'Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains'

摘要

Ted Binnema's Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) may be the most important book on the Aboriginal history of western Canada since the publication of Dale Russell's Eighteenth Century Crée and their Neighbours fifteen years ago. Binnema's synthesis of human and environmental change spanning more than a thousand years of northwestern plains history, though perhaps inspired by Howard Meredith's Dancing on Common Ground: Tribal Cultures and Alliances on the Southern Plains, is truly innovative in Canadian scholarship. In addition, he has provided a detailed account of the shifting political and military situation in the eighteenth century, a period when horses, the fur trade, and smallpox reached the region. What makes Common and Contested Ground significant is its approach. It is the first work of history on the Canadian plains to truly ground its subjects on the changing landscape, Instead of an ethnohistory dealing solely with cultural phenomena, Binnema has accorded the physical environment the weight it deserves when examining the human history of the northwestern plains. By taking a balanced regional approach, he has demonstrated why some groups prevailed as others declined. Common and Contested Ground is the first historical work to seriously consider the role of long-term environmental change in the development of societies on the Canadian plains, Binnema rightly draws the connection between historical change among the hunting and gathering societies on the northwestern plains and the impact of climatic variability. Climatic forces have become increasingly recognized as an agent of societal change. The recent publication of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed has introduced climate change as an historical force to a mass audience. Before the arrival of the Europeans, germs, goods, and market economy, climatic variability was the predominant factor in precipitating cultural or technological change in prehistoric communities. With the recognition of climate change as a central force in northwestern plains history, Binnema has broken new ground in Canadian scholarship.