The Cheyenne.

Carson, James Taylor

by John H. Moore. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers, 1996. ix, 342 pp. $27.95 U.S.

The Cheyenne is John H. Moore's contribution to the series "The Peoples of America" which is intended to acquaint readers with the histories of different Native groups across North America. The series' previous volumes have surveyed their subjects from ancient times to the present and have drawn on recent scholarship to revise past interpretations. They should go a long way towards replacing musty tribal histories with up-to-date and ethnohistorically informed survey texts, and The Cheyenne is no different Based upon his extensive fieldwork with the Cheyenne communities in Montana and Oklahoma and his own substantial contributions to Plains ethnohistory, the author has succeeded in writing an insightful and unique survey of one of the most wellknown but least understood Native societies of the American Great Plains.

Around 1200 B.C. several offshoots of a group archaeologists called the Algonquians began to migrate from their homeland north of the Great Lakes to the more fertile lands of present-day Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Despite the lack of historical sources for the period, Moore pulls together recent scholarship in language reconstruction and archaeology to piece together an interpretation of what one of these offshoots, the proto-Cheyennes, were like. His efforts shed considerable light on their sedentary lifestyle in fortified towns and on their dependence on agriculture as well as seasonal hunting. One would be hard pressed to imagine a group more different from the Cheyennes that captured the American public's imagination in the dimestore novels and cowboy flicks of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

Not until the arrival of European guns and horses did the Cheyennes move onto the Great Plains and take up full-time pursuit of the great herds of buffalo that blanketed the region. The adoption of what Moore characterizes as a pastoralist lifestyle was advantageous for three reasons: it provided the Cheyennes with yearround access to the buffaloes and to far-flung trading partners, and it heightened their military prowess. The Cheyennes exploited their status as middle men and their power as formidable warriors to carve out an important place in the region's complex geopolitics and in the history of the nineteenth century American West.

Contact with Europeans and the transition to pastoralism produced other dramatic changes in Cheyenne culture, and Moore departs from his historical narrative to examine in detail topics like warfare, social organization, literature, and cosmology. The results, however, are problematic. When, for instance, he discusses the rise of the Dog Soldier societies of the nineteenth century in the same breath as Cheyenne experiences in World War II, or when he relates traditional folk tales and Cheyenne reactions to recent movies, he conflates past and present and obscures rather than explicates the relationship between history and culture, and change and persistence.

The Plains period of Cheyenne history closed after several decades of episodic warfare against the United States. By the late nineteenth century the federal government had confined the Northern Cheyenne to reserves in Montana and the Southern branch to reservations in Oklahoma. Land fraud, governmental abuse, and terrible events like the Sand Creek Massacre comprise a litany of suffering familiar to students of recent Native history, but they take on added meaning when Moore interjects the Cheyennes' perspectives on their past. The reader sees in the histories of the families that Moore has grown to know over the past twenty years the cumulative effects of decades of federal mismanagement and economic exploitation. The impact of their stories is profound and gives the book a poignancy that is rare in comparable works of synthesis.

Notwithstanding his engaging and careful presentation of Cheyenne culture and history, however, Moore's use of an "us" and "them" style of exposition heightens the reader's own sense of otherness and detachment from the subject. The point is driven home in the author's concluding description of what one should expect when one meets a Cheyenne family. The warmth and generosity of Cheyenne hosts is undeniable, but the fact that Moore has to explain in such painstaking fashion how one ought to behave in their presence reminds the reader that the gaps that separate Euroamericans from First Nations' peoples remain deep and wide.

In The Cheyenne Moore has crafted a fine description of Cheyenne culture, society, and history over a span of three thousand years. More importantly, he has forced the reader to think more broadly about what the Cheyennes' experience means to all North Americans. Such achievements make the book worthwhile reading for specialists and generalists alike.