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Key Quote: “Comanche bands and division formed an internally fluid but externally coherent collation that accomplished through a creative blending of violence, diplomacy, extortion, trade, and kinship politics what more rigidly structured expires have achieved through direct political control: they imposed their will upon neighboring polities, harness the economic potential of other societies for their own use, and persuade their rivals to adopt and accept their customs and norms (p4).
Key Terms: Comanche Imperialism, Comanche Barrier, Comanche Ascendancy, Comancheria, “Cameo” theory of history, Frontier Exchange Economies, David Weber, Ross Frank, Andres Resendez, Ned Blackhawk, Gary Clayton Anderson, James Brooks, Upstreaming, Sidestreaming, Bruce Trigger, Aggressive Power Politics
The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen provides new southwestern scholarship, which focuses on the Comanche Indian tribe as a calculated political force that managed southwestern territory. Hamalainen asserts that the Comancheria were an aggressive, violent group utilizing political and power flexibility to assert imperial dominance. This scholarship offers numerous comparisons and some differences to Spanish colonization. Arguing his scholarship centers within previous Southwestern Indian Agency, Hamalainen urges readers to “look at Native policies toward colonial powers as more than defensive strategies of resistance and containment,” (p7). This non-linear perspective provides scholarship to illustrate a Non-Anglo perspective. Classifying the southwest as a ‘zone for cultural interpenetration’ and a socially charged space provides new historians to recast the southwest as an dynamic power, both politically and economically. The author utilizes works of Weber, Frank, Resendez, Blackhawk, Brooks, but relies heavily on Fredrick Hoxie’s method of an ‘cookbook ethnohistory’(p14), which plays up aspects of Comanche Behavior.
This reading contradicts itself in places, but provides a suggestive perspective to the political prowess of the Comanche Empire. Hamalainen utilizes primary sources from Spanish, French, Mexican and Anglo-American documents to create a stereoscopic vision of the Comancheria. He utilizes these sources to get a feel of the Comanche objectives during their encounters with their ‘co-creators of the common world’ (p8). However, he mentions that their intentions as imperialist are calculated, key players forcing newbie colonizers to compete for southwest resources. If the Comanche Indians were truly the calculative, aggressive and manipulative with their co-creators, then how are all of these encounters with Spanish, French, Mexican and Anglo-Americans similar enough to gauge and suggest their motives? Hamalainen suggests that the Comanche Indians and Euro-Americans understood each other too well and did not like what each other had in mind (in terms of southwestern expansion). If it is really worth mentioning or suggesting that they were ‘too much alike’ then why go to the extensive efforts to make both the Comanche and co-creators voice different? It is to illustrate that the Comanche Indians as imperialist in the colonial world. My only issue really is not the fault of the author but rather the evidence utilized. Hamalainen states that the evidence is ‘invariably infected with gaps, accidental misreadings and intentional misconstructions’ (p13). When reading the modern tones and suggestive wording through both chapters, you can visually see Hamalaienen struggle with the fragmentary pieces of Comanche encounters and life. This is most apparent when he mentions modern-worded perspectives (p 50, 73) and gender bifurcation like the masculine dishonor of losing one’s wife or children in battle. While this is an excellent and fresh perceptive on southwestern history, I believe Hamalaienen stains to alter the collective memory of tribal Native American groups utilized modern tones and wider known histories of Spanish colonization efforts. Hodes and Hamalaienen both deploy storytelling techniques, which were needed in both cases of evidence, to illustrate an effective, capturing and plausible new narrative.