Ecology and Ethnogenesis: An Environmental History of the Wind River Shoshones, 1000–1868

In Ecology and Ethnogenesis, Adam R. Hodge presents a deep history of an Indigenous community too often overlooked by historians. This is a book of remarkable depth that tracks a group of people as they morphed culturally and politically during nearly a millennium. The book focuses on this group’s transformation from the Numu, the Eastern Shoshones, to the Wind River Shoshones over the course of that thousand-year span. Hodge argues that movement between vastly different ecologies prior to arrival of European colonists, as well as the changes to those environments wrought by European colonialism, played key roles in the development of modern Wind River Shoshone society. It is fundamentally an environmental history, showing how one Indigenous society’s environmental context, and their adaptation to ecological changes, shaped their social and cultural structure. “If we hope to grasp [the Wind River Shoshones’] past,” Hodge writes, “it is especially important to explore...