Description

Boundaries Between skillfully relates the history of the Southern Paiutes from their first contacts with Europeans through the end of the twentieth century. In an engaging style, Martha C. Knack combines contemporary oral histories, meticulous archival research, original ethnographic fieldwork, and an astute critical perspective on Indian-white relations. Before the arrival of European Americans, Southern Paiutes foraged the arid hills and valleys of the area known today as southern Utah, northern Arizona, southern Nevada, and southeastern California. By all the "rules" of history and anthropology, such a small-scale, foraging culture should have disappeared long ago, but the Southern Paiutes survive, and their story unsettles assumptions about the role that social complexity, power, and culture play in the dynamics of human history.