I read this book as the last book for the last project of my Master degree in Humanities with a concentration in US History looking at JEDI topics. We were required to pick from a list of well known Western authors and do a biography of them while also doing a dive into their works. I picked Glenda Riley because we had already touched upon her in case and from that I knew that she had focused on women's topics and Native Americans, both topics that I was focusing on. It was also great when I found a hard copy of the book at the library at the college I work at.
This book looks at the interactions between white women and Native Americans on the Western frontier. The book is mostly looking at the white experience and views because Riley couldn't get much from the Native perspective. She talks about the difficulty of getting the Native experience due to no written records on their side. It would have been great if she would have interviewed living Natives to see if they had any oral stories that could have given a better perspective from the Native side. It would also have been good if she would have looked at other frontier women then just the white side, like by bring in black voices as well. She did look at some other groups like the Mormons to compare how white women treated them vs Native women. The book does a good job introducing readers to some complex topics, but the one-sidedness of the book makes it feel incomplete. Even with this I would give it 4 stars out of 5 or a B+ because if nothing else it makes you think about how different topics around race and gender can be complex or impacted by outside factors that you may never have thought of.
When it comes to the author she is well know, but when I was trying to do research on her I found a lot of conflicting information on everything from her birthdate to where she got her degrees. It actually came to the point where I felt that there had to be several different Glenda Rileys doing Western history. I was surprised by this since she is so well known.
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Key things that stood out:
"His bellicosity was absolute: "last winter we killed one tribe off and will have to kill a few more before we can make them behave. That is the way to convert them to the Mormon faith."" (189). This came from a Mormon in Utah. It shows how religion has been used historically to justify killing and hurting people.
"Many despised Catholic priests for establishing sexual liaisons with native women." (196) Pain and suffering inflected on people by the Christian church as known no limits. Has the above showed a different form of Christianity also hurting people, the Catholic church has a long history of this where sexual abuse continues into even the present day because of no one standing up to them.
"Individually and gradually, women learned to perceive the divergence between types of Indians, to realize that different groups possessed different qualities, and to reject the image of "Indian" as one amorphous collection of people." (155) Reading this at the time I did had a huge impact on me. It was during the time when the Denver Museum of Nature and history had announced that they would be closing the Native American exhibit because a few Natives took offense to what was in there. Instead of just making changes to the exhibit like updating language the museum staff chose to erase Native Americans. The museum thought that these few Native Americans spoke for all Native Americans, which even this line in this books shows that not all Natives are the same and that they are not all of the same opinion. This could even be seen where Natives were making complaints on the museum's Facebook and Instagram pages and the museum was actively choosing to not listen to the larger Native population in the Denver Metro area. Melissa (Stoltz) Bechhoefer the current Director of Integrative Collections and past Anthropology Collections Manager (NAGPRA Coordinator) is one of the museum staff behind this blatant cultural bias (also is responsible for how they are treating their Egyptian exhibit in relation since they are fine keeping a person's body on display). For a person that has a Masters in Museum and Field Studies and what looks like dual BAs in Archaeology and Geology, she should know better. At the same time after working in higher ed for nearly 20 years I know that a lot of people get degrees that don't really deserve them. Her actions in relation to this topic clearly show that she was not paying attention to some of the most basic topics that both her archaeology and museum degrees should have covered. Right now history, museums, and culture are in a sad state in Colorado due to the actions of the Denver Museum and this book would actually be a good required reading for their staff and maybe they might learn something.
Info on Melissa Bechhoefer came from her LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-bechhoefer-94485a1a4/
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Top Picture From: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6350025-confronting-race
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