Review
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Title: First Peoples of Great Salt Lake: A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming (Utah Series on Great Salt Lake and the Great Basin)
Author: Steven R Simms
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: Non-Fiction, History
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 242
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 1647691370
Price: $34.95
Reviewed by Meagan Anderson Evans (meagan@ou.edu) for the Association for Mormon Letters
The first in the Utah Series on the Great Salt Lake & The Great Bason and the winner of the Don D. & Catherine S. Fowler Prize, Dr. Steven R. Simms’ First Peoples of Great Salt Lake: A Cultural Landscape from Nevada to Wyoming is, according to its preface, “a story about where people lived and how they lived […] It is a story of cultural resilience, persistence, and the changing roles of people in landscapes and ecosystems” (ix). The text “[encourages] approachable reading” (xi) and carefully weaves together concepts and themes from the fields of geology, anthropology, archeology, and history with a general audience in mind. Furthermore, in considering the reader, Simms offers a straightforward reflection on his methods, “I do privilege the telling of the story by occasionally adding a dose of conclusiveness that tests the limits of the evidence,” he continues, “Thus, my cut-to-the-chase telling may strike some readers, and my colleagues, as speculative” (xii). From the beginning of the text, Simms is candid concerning his objectives and methods.
The first chapter, “Great Salt Lake Genealogy,” traces the relationship between Lake Bonneville and Great Salt Lake through the methodology of “genealogy,” a framework applied throughout the book. Simms writes that genealogy “implies heritage and humanity” and that “visualizing the history of the Great Salt Lake as genealogy offers an opportunity to know the lake as a collective heritage. This legacy began with Native Americans of the deep past and continued throughout the dynamic history of ancestors and descendants” (7). Applying genealogy as both “metaphor” (162) and methodology for analyzing the “lake as collective heritage” presents an anthropocentric viewpoint of the landmark. As a reader, I wonder how dependent Simms’ conceptions of a “genealogy” of place are on human inhabitants, and if this reliance on human beings counters traditional Native American perceptions of, and belief systems surrounding place?
Following the introduction and first chapter, the following sections trace the relationship of people to place and are titled “From Bonneville to Great Salt Lake,” “Explorers in an Ecological Moment,” and “Pioneers and First Settlers.” These “first settlers” and “pioneers” are those whose journey in the region surrounding Great Salt Lake began thousands of years ago. The fifth chapter, “Transformations of Place, ” begins with the retelling of a 1971 story by Shoshone woman Maude Moon. The narrative traces the importance of pickleweed to Native peoples living in the region. The chapter ends with privileging another Native voice, that of a Western Apache elder, Nick Thompson, “White men need paper maps. We have maps in our minds” (57). Simms privileges retellings of place—especially those by Native American peoples— primarily from the twentieth century. How would the text be different if the author considered the work of contemporary, culturally-rooted, place-based Native scholars such as Unangan scholar Eve Tuck, Jo-ann Archibald (Stó:lō), Shawn Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree), Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), or Enrique Salmón (Tarahumara), among many others? This is not to say that twenty-first-century voices must be privileged above all others; it is simply a recognition of more current scholarship.
In the sixth chapter, “A Human Wilderness,” Simms rightfully centers voices of Native authors and Elders, including Luther Standing Bear, chief of the Oglala Sioux, “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people” (58). Additionally, the chapter explores the use of rock imagery as an element of “social geography” and its intimate connection with place, a theme traced throughout the remaining text. The final chapters, “Indigenes, Immigrants, and First Farmers,” “The Most Populous Part of Utah,” “Upheaval,” “Descendants,” and “Indigenes Meet Travelers” continue tracing the genealogy of Great Salt Lake.
The “denouement,” or the twelfth chapter, begins with the following definition: “Place is conditioned by landscape and conceptualized in terms of experience and circumstance. We take the notion of place for granted because our attachment to places seems natural and comforting […] Keith Basso,” whom the author quotes liberally throughout the text, “has observed that while social scientists view the concept of place variously—such as a beneficial component of personality or as a means of social integration—he sees it as ‘a species of involvement with the natural and social environment, a way of appropriating portions of the earth…the familiar province of everyday events’” (161). Since Basso’s writings on the Western Apache in the 1990s, many authors have written of place and Native American relationships to place.
By way of conclusion and writing of the connection between place and culture, Simms suggests, “Sense of place is central to understanding the cultural landscape spanning parts of Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah, with Great Salt Lake at the geographic center. I invite you to explore the foreign countries encountered in deep time as you travel the inspiring landscapes north, east, west, and south of Great Salt Lake” (163c). The storytelling aspect of Simms’ writing, paired with his accessible writing style and inclusion of colorful illustrations and maps by Chelsea McRaven Feeney (cartography), Eric S. Carlson (original art), and François Gohier (photography), combine to create a one-of-a-kind manual to the Great Salt Lake and its first inhabitants. My hope is that this text functions as a springboard for many to analyze the concept of place in critical inquiry more closely.