James F. Brooks

Thursday, April 15, 2004

5:00 to 7 p.m.

McCord Auditorium, 3rd Floor, Dallas

Director of the School of American Research Press and member of the SAR Research Faculty

This free public lecture explores the gendered aspects of one of the most horrific cases of intra-Indian violence in the colonial southwest - the massacre of the inhabitants of Awat'ovi Pueblo by neighboring Hopi villagers in the autumn of 1700.  Long understood through Spanish colonial documents as an act of retribution for Awat'ovi's willingness to allow  Franciscan missionaries to re-establish the Catholic church at the pueblo, it seems that deeply gendered cycles of ritual "transgressions" and extreme acts of purification may also have underlain the event.  Women found themselves at the center of intra- and inter-village tensions between innovation and tradition, and experienced the violence as simultaneously victims of and agents in cultural revitalizing.  Drawing upon published Hopi oral histories, interviews with contemporary Hopis, theological literature, and recent archaeological evidence, Brooks argues a larger case, that we must open a space for consideration of gendered violence in the pre-Columbian southwest, which may help us to understand no only social tensions and catastrophes in Hopi history, but shifting dynamics of power and exploitation among Ancestral Pueblos across the whole of the Colorado Plateau.

In 2002 Brooks published Captives& Cousins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c2002) which has already won a number of major awards: the 2003 Bancroft Award from Columbia University to a distinguished book in American History, the 2003 Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for "literary distinction in historical writing," and the 2003 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American History by a first-time author. His winning of those prizes in the spring of 2003 led the Chronicle of Higher Education to write a major article about him, and his work, and his "unprecedented sweep of the history profession's top prizes." Later in the year, announcements came of two other major awards: the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize from the Western History Association and the Frederick Douglass prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.

In a blurb on the book cover, David Weber says: “Bold and brilliant, James Brooks’ fresh look at raiding and slaving takes us beyond the familiar categories of Indians and Hispanics to reveal the deep divisions of gender and class within each group. Sweeping over four centuries, his vivid narrative tells us why people simultaneously preyed on one another and absorbed one another in this violent land.”

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Last updated January 7, 2004.