Abstract
Cynthia Radding’s Bountiful Deserts places archival research in conversation with ecology, archaeology, and Indigenous oral tradition to craft a compelling cultural and environmental history of northern New Spain. Radding effectively shows how an interdisciplinary and bottom-up approach to the ‘spatial turn’ in history can center Indigenous experiences and cosmologies in colonial contexts. With its synthesis of a broad array of sources and disciplines, this book represents a worthy expansion of Indigenous- and ecology-centered approaches to environmental history and cultural geography.
Radding recognizes that indigeneity inherently implies a deep relationship to place, thus making the ‘spatial turn’ an apt tool for Indigenous histories. Hence, her eloquent statement, ‘territoriality together with indigeneity evolved. . .as cultural processes rooted in physical environments’ (p. 69, italics in original), forms a backbone for her cross-disciplinary methodology. She grounds her investigation of Yoreme and Yoeme history in their spatial and spiritual understanding of itom ania (our world), as revealed through documented oral traditions such as the Yoeme Testamento. This approach moves well past perfunctory or surface-level references to Indigenous knowledge, offering scholars an exemplar of profound and constructive engagement with Indigenous spatiality. Radding’s repeated invocations of itom ania in its various forms–sea world, flower world, forest world–beautifully show how Indigenous perceptions of place created meaning in the varied ecologies of northern New Spain. Her exploration of oral traditions further reveals how Indigenous cosmologies integrated Christianity while remaining deeply rooted in local geographical knowledge.
Devoting the first two chapters to the cultural and physical geography of Petatlán, ‘the place of reed houses’ (p. 74), before it became northern New Spain, Radding does justice to the region’s millennia of Indigenous history. She references biology as well as archaeology to reveal how symbiotic relationships between humans and plants–agaves, corn, amaranths–developed over thousands of years, beginning as early as 7000 BCE. Radding focuses heavily on the monte, or thorn forest, where the Yoemem and Yoremem foraged for food in addition to their agricultural lands. Neither fully domesticated nor fully ‘wild’, without either the property boundaries or the permanent structures expected by the Spanish, the monte reveals the complexities of Indigenous cultural landscapes. Through the monte, Radding offers an alternative way to understand the ‘social production of space’ outside of urban contexts–instead of centering the built environment, cultural geography can emphasize the interplay between humans and ecology. Although Radding does not explicitly integrate posthumanism or multispecies thinking, her analysis of the monte aligns with these concepts. Radding convincingly illustrates how people and plants co-created the cultural and environmental spaces of northern New Spain.
The second half of the book traces conflicts over land and power from the 16th to 18th centuries. Using sources including disputed land claims, missionary reports, and petitions to viceregal authorities, Radding shows how Indigenous people adapted the mission system to their existing geographies, used Spanish legal structures to defend their land, and rebelled against colonial power when it encroached too deeply on their livelihoods and lands, including the Yaqui and Mayo uprising of 1739–41. Indigenous traditions of land use rights conflicted with the growing colonial impetus toward enclosure for exclusive proprietorship, and Radding’s interpretation effectively ties these political and economic conflicts to their ecological and spiritual contexts.
Throughout the book, Radding fruitfully builds connections across numerous historical and scholarly dichotomies, such as sedentary/nomadic, agriculture/foraging, culture/nature, oral/written, and traditional wisdom/scientific knowledge–perceived dichotomies that did not apply to the Yoeme and Yoreme ways of life and need not apply to contemporary narrations of their history, either. Radding’s reading of how Yoeme and Yoreme spiritual tradition overlapped with place and landscape to form specifically Indigenous cultural landscapes is compelling. Her deft interweaving of scientific climate and ecological data with Indigenous oral tradition results in a captivating picture of the changing cultural landscapes of itom ania, and can serve as a model for future scholarship that seeks to center Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
