Thomas E. Sheridan

The limits of power: the political ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3), The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

ETHNOBIOLOGY FOR A DIVERSE WORLD DEFINING NEW DISCIPLINARY TRAJECTORIES: MIXING POLITICAL ECOLOGY WITH ETHNOBIOLOGY

That which we assume to be a distinct scholarly discipline today may not be so tomorrow; boundaries shift, and territories become redefined in academia just as they do in geopolitics. And so, it would not be surprising to see within just a few decades the methodological pretexts of ethnobiological inquiries once again overhauled as they have been several times already. We anticipate and in fact welcome the re-delineation of the boundaries of this discipline as a result of advances made in political ecology and in other fields as well. Although the term ‘‘political ecology’’ was first used in print more than 80 years ago (Thone 1935), it has been more widely used over the last 30 years in a particular manner by cultural ecologists and human geographers. Since anthropologist Eric R. Wolf published his seminal article entitled ‘‘Ownership and Political Ecology,’’ social scientists have used the concept of political ecology to balance their understanding of ‘‘the pressures emanating from the larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem’’ (Wolf 1972:202). As noted a quarter century ago by applied anthropologist Thomas Sheridan (1988:xvi), this is because it has become increasingly necessary to ‘‘wed the approaches of political economy, which focus upon society’s place in a region, nation, or ‘‘world sphere,’’ with those of cultural ecology, which examine adaptations to local environmental and demographic factors.’’ We are of the opinion that there is also a need to wed insights from political ecology with ethnobiology, which has largely ignored the global and macroeconomic pressures on the so-called ‘‘traditional’’ agricultural, fishing, hunting and foraging cultures with which ethnobiologists have characteristically been engaged. Despite the broad use of both the concepts and methodologies of political ecology in geography, anthropology and history, articles in the Journal of Ethnobiology have seldom used this term, and it is even in less currency in Economic Botany, the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and the Journal of Ethnobiology

Indian Utilization of Eelgrass (Zostera Marina L.) in Northwestern Mexico: The Spanish Colonial Record

ABSTRACTSpanish colonial documents verify exploitation of eelgrass seeds as a major food resource by the Seri and possibly other Indian groups along the mainland coast of northwestern Mexico at least as early as the 17th century. Use of this unique marine seed plant was apparently common knowledge among local Jesuit missionaries.

The other Arizona, redux

In 1871 an O’odham war party slipped north of the Salt River and attacked a group of Yavapais below Four Peaks in the Mazatzal Mountains. The Pimas killed most of the adults but took the children captive, including a little boy named Wassaja. They sold him to an Italian photographer named Carlos Gentile for thirty dollars, and Gentile renamed him Carlos Montezuma. That name encompassed a world of changing meaning for Wassaja and Indian children like him. Gentile gave the boy his first name, but the second was generic Indian, harkening back to an Aztec past that had nothing to do with the Yavapais of central Arizona. Wassaja would never see his immediate family again. His mother was shot by army scouts while searching for her children. His father died on the San Carlos Reservation. His sisters were sold to a man who took them to Mexico. It was a time of diaspora and disintegration, when the Anglo world felt justified in taking Indian children away from their parents to “civilize” them. Wassaja grew up in Illinois and New York, far from his kinsmen and the sacred mountains of his people. When he returned to Arizona thirty years later, Carlos Montezuma was a physician and a leader in the emerging pan-Indian movement. One of the first Native Americans to receive a medical degree, he spent seven years working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on reservations across the West. His experiences gave him an abiding contempt for the BIA and its reservation system. Like Booker T. Washington and other reformers of the era, Montezuma believed that Native Americans had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and “press forward where the Indians ought to be—man among men.” He advocated hard work and

Across the Northern Frontier: Spanish Explorations in Colorado@@@Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire

The Spanish empire in the Americas spanned two continents and a vast diversity of peoples and landscapes. Yet intriguing parallels characterized conquest, colonization, and indigenous resistance along its northern and southern frontiers, from the role played by Jesuit missions in the subjugation of native peoples to the emergence of livestock industries, with their attendant cowboys and gauchos and threats of Indian raids. In this book, nine historians, three anthropologists, and one sociologist compare and contrast these fringes of New Spain between 1500 and 1880, showing that in each region the frontier represented contested ground where different cultures and polities clashed in ways heretofore little understood. The contributors reveal similarities in Indian-white relations, military policy, economic development, and social structure; and they show differences in instances such as the emergence of a major urban center in the south and the activities of rival powers. The authors also show how ecological and historical differences between the northern and southern frontiers produced intellectual differences as well. In North America, the frontier came to be viewed as a land of opportunity and a crucible of democracy; in the south, it was considered a spawning ground of barbarism and despotism. By exploring issues of ethnicity and gender as well as the different facets of indigenous resistance, both violent and nonviolent, these essays point up both the vitality and the volatility of the frontier as a place where power was constantly being contested and negotiated.