The Roots of Dependency: Subsistance, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos Book

Richard White's The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos is a set of three case studies in which the author examines "why and how human societies have influenced the environment, and what the social consequences of human-induced environmental change have been" through the lens of social, political, and cultural characteristics for each tribe. The conventional ideas of disease as the main reason for the decline of many native tribes in the United States is challenged in this book. White lays out his thesis by presenting the histories of the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (or Dines) as three horticulturist, subsistence groups of people whose cultures were significantly affected by the influx of white Europeans and Americans that moved westward during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and how the actions of the whites changed the ways of life for the groups of people they encountered. White argues that this path toward dependency cannot be discussed only as a combination of disease and violence, but a complex combination of culture, politics, and the market economy of the white people. These complexities are interwoven with primary and secondary resources to describe the community-based, socialistic societal structures and how those structures responded to the increasing pressures of the market by the European and American whites played a large role on the paths to dependency of the three tribes.

White structures the book chronologically, starting during the late-seventeenth century with the Choctaws who inhabited what today is the state of Mississippi. The Choctaws were non-centralized groups of people, each led by various chiefs, groups of chiefs, and types of chiefs. Their lifestyle was one of subsistence, primarily fed through agriculture and secondarily fed through the communal hunting of white-tailed deer and foraging. White focused much of the first chapters on the decline and rebound of the deer populations due to the violence amongst neighboring groups of people, essentially creating safe haven borderlands around the Choctaws' territory that allowed deer populations to climb. The Choctaws successfully traded with the French, Spanish, and English for many decades using a play-off system that kept the colonists vying for political power among the Natives. Initially the Choctaws were interested in the market economy as a way to maintain power through the act of giving and receiving gifts with outsiders and reciprocity and redistribution of gifts among themselves. Their subsistence lifestyle began to change drastically as the French colonists' power declined and the English colonists gained a foothold in the area. As the English introduced alcohol into the Choctaws' way of life, the deer populations began to plummet due to over-hunting to meet English traders consistent supply of rum and whiskey. As the Choctaws' reliance on alcohol grew, the English introduced the idea of credit to the Natives, allowing them to purchase themselves into an alcohol-induced rut that they would not be able to overcome. Over a short period of time, this influence of the market economy drastically changed the way of life for the Choctaws, as crop failures and an over-hunted deer population drove many farther from their ancestral homelands to the west across the Mississippi River. Once spread out geographically, along with the influx of mixed European and Native blood leadership in the west and the growing indebtedness to the traders, the Choctaws found themselves negotiating to stay on their ancestral lands or be removed to Indian Territory.

During the period of the Choctaws removal to Oklahoma, White begins his main narrative about the Pawnees, which, similarly, were groups of horticulturist, herds people who inhabited the land that is central Nebraska today. The Pawnees lived primarily as horticulturists who planted their fields with the three sisters, and each year, traveled west in July and August to hunt bison. The villages of the groups centered on the Platte River and the tributaries, providing water and what little timber resources could be found on the plains. White notes the Pawnees intent to protect timber resources after realizing their diminishment over time, especially as the horse was introduced into the culture. The Pawnees became known as adept horse people, using the animals to change how they hunted the bison and moved across the land. While the horses provided advantages for the group, they also had drawbacks, such as the groups' abilities to feed the horses during times of drought and the raids made by other groups, particularly the Sioux. As white traders arrived more frequently on the Pawnee territory, the centralized system of structure kept the group from experiencing similar problems of the Choctaws. The Pawnee chief allowed the traders only to trade with himself as he redistributed the manufactured goods to the rest of the people. This difference in social structure from the Choctaws kept alcohol from damaging the group. Pawnees also valued modesty and thrift, only trading to suffice their basic needs. As droughts during the late-nineteenth century intensified, the combination of many horses to feed, the looting of the food stores by neighboring tribes, and the severe violence inflicted upon the Pawnees by the Sioux, led the group to the brink of starvation. They sought assistance from the Americans and were removed to Indian Territory.

The third group that White focuses on are the Navajo (the Dine) that continue to inhabit some of their ancestral land on their current reservation in southern Utah, northern Arizona, and northwestern New Mexico. The Dine used horticulture as their primary food source, planting foods similar to the Choctaws and Pawnees. Just as the Choctaws practiced cattle ranching and the Pawnees were horse people, the Dine grew their practice of sheep and goat herding to over two million animals in the late-nineteenth century. This practice was central to the Dine as their form of subsistence and wealth through the quantity of their herds as a way of survival. The Dine also valued the act of generosity as it brought honor to the individual and clan. Water scarcity on the west coast during the 1920s, the construction of the Boulder (Hoover) Dam, and the subsequent perceived threat of siltation from the Colorado River tributaries running through Dine lands, brought white Americans up against the traditional ways of life for the Dine. White focuses intensely upon John Collier, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Well-intended, but with a gross misunderstanding of the cultural importance of the herds to the social structure of the Dine people, Collier instated the Navajo Livestock Reduction program, which reduced the Dine' precious herds to half. This pivotal action impoverished many Dine families and widened the path to their dependency, forcing the Dine to enter the market economy and requiring them to sell their labor as wage-earning was their last asset for survival.

White's book is deep, and yet a few questions come to mind, such as White's choice of Tribes. White's use of resources is wide and varied, taking information from both primary and secondary sources within the fields of history, anthropology, archaeology, and sociology. The sources provide depth and solid evidence to support White's thesis, even while he admits the resource material for the Choctaws and Pawnees, particularly in the field of history, is scarce. One assumes he choose these groups due to their similarities in social structure and horticulturist, herding lifestyles, but the question remains especially due to the lack of primary and secondary sources about the cultures of the Pawnees and the Choctaws. As a set of case studies, another thought that arises is that of generalization. Can these ideas be translated to groups other than those that White has discussed? Could the themes he raised encompass other groups of Native peoples? As he states himself, he draws from more than the conventional belief that disease and violence created dependency among Native peoples, as he dives into the individual cultures that goes beyond the materialist views of the anthropologists, the romanticized views of historians, or the bias against Native groups found in primary sources. All sources are taken with a grain of salt.

White takes three similar, yet separate, groups of people from three separate places in history and geography to discuss the effect of the market economy in creating dependency to the white colonial, and later, American government. He presents a well-rounded hypothesis as he intricately weaves a subtle message of the community-based social structures of the three groups, the value they each placed upon generosity over individual gain, and the devastating effects of the market economy upon those structures. With each group, White subtly discusses the effects of the cultures on the various environments that they lived in and stops his argument at the point of dependency to reinforce this idea. The natural environments of the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Dine and their exploitation to intensify white wealth were irresistible to the white people expanding westward. Through the market economy and the dramatic effects of alcohol, intensifying use of land and resources, and the forcible regulation of policy, the cultural environments of the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Dine were damaged beyond repair, unrecovered to the present day.