Today we have no land, no place to camp except on land that people say is theirs and not ours. Please give us some of our land back, enough to dignify our lives. A common story you say, the history of Indian-white relations in the United States, in the New World for that matter. But there is something in the Utah Paiute experience that sets it apart from other groups, and something in the telling of that history that makes this an important book, not just for ethnohistorians, but for Utah and Mormon historians. Ron Holt recounts Southern Paiute history within the theoretical framework of dependency and paternalism.
Dependency is a concept of intercultural relationships conditioned by inequality.
Colonial interference precipitates conflict and crisis in the smooth functioning of native subsistence and cultural patterns. As those patterns fail to preserve life, choices narrow, and dependency on colonial alternatives increases. Holt describes both the continuity and change in Southern Paiute culture through intercultural contacts with Ute and Spanish slavers, trappers, and early Mormon settlers. Paiutes were easy targets, passive and lacking a rigid corporate organization-traits that also made them difficult to annihilate or assimilate. Pushed from their hunting and foraging areas by Mormon settlers in the 1850s, Utah Paiutes refused relocation to distant reservations.