Animating the Land: Native American Spirituality, Identity and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Contemporary Literature

The paper analyzes the elements that constitute Native American identity in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993). In the novel, King juxtaposes two ethnic identities, white Christian American, representing the majority in the American society, and Native American, representing a minority. King portrays the struggle of Native Americans in the US and Canada to define their identity given the historically long rift between their native heritage and the white culture. Stigmatized for their ethnicity and race, Native Americans were exposed to marginalization and prejudice and forced to somehow overcome this position. The struggle has been made more difficult by the efforts of the dominant society to assimilate them and at the same time prevent them from claiming full citizenship. King carefully weaves the stories of his characters, who constantly go back and forth between the reservation lands and the outside world, having to find their position in both and usually not belonging to either. By focusing on the world of the reservation, Native American spirituality, tribal tradition of storytelling, and creation myths, King examines different aspects of Native American ethnic identity and, through juxtaposition of the Native American ethnic identity with that of the dominant society, reevaluates the marginalized position of the Native Americans.

In 1932 Dorothy Dunn established the Studio, a painting program for Native American students, at Santa Fe Indian School. Dunn taught at the Studio for only 5 years; however, she was influential on the development of both art education for Native American students and Native American easel painting. Dunn taught several Native American students who became well known artists. Her teaching theories influenced the art education practices of several subsequent programs for Native American students. Her theories about Native American art influenced what was accepted and rejected by critics, galleries, collectors, museums, and the general public for decades. Recently Smith (1999) and Stokrocki (2000) have called for more research on art education in the American southwest. Smith brings Dorothy Dunn into art education historical literature as an important historical figure in southwestern art education. Stokrocki praises Smith's efforts to make this major female art educator's work more visible and asks for more research about her. With this article I will continue the dialogue begun by Smith and Stokrocki concerning the work of Dorothy Dunn by exploring Dorothy Dunn's theories and art education practices. I will examine implications of Dunn's theories and art education practices for both the art education of Native American students and for Native American art. This study also can help fill the gap identified by Smith (1999) in existing art education historical literature concerning the art education of minority students. I want to bring to the dialogue issues of identity and authenticity, which are important concerns in Native American art, and which are deeply intertwined with the history of art education for Native American students. Dunn's art teaching, the exhibition of her students' works, and her publications helped to codify ideas about Native American identity, Native American art, and its authenticity for both Native people and nonNatives. Some Native American artists found in Dunn's influences the means to create positive identities for themselves as Native people. Others rejected Dunn's influences and from this rejection created a different basis for their Native American identities and established new directions in Native American art. Stokrocki (2000) asked that the voices of Native Americans and women be brought forth in research about the history of art education in the American southwest. Although I have not conducted the ethnohistories of Native Americans and women that Stokrocki rightly calls for, as a Native American woman researcher who has chosen to write on this topic I do bring one such voice to the dialogue. Dorothy Dunn herself published in both the literature of art education and the literature of Native American art studies. To date, very little has been published about Dunn in art education historical literature. Consequently, many of the secondary sources that I use for this paper come from the field of Native American art studies. Early Native American Education Policy The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has been involved in the education of Native American students since the late 19th century. Indian education policy prior to the New Deal era focused on assimilation of Native students into mainstream American society. This was thought to be best accomplished by replacing savagism with civilization (Adams, 1995). The annihilation of traditional Indian cultures was seen as the removal of a major roadblock to civilization. This cultural annihilation included preventing students from practicing their traditional religions and speaking their Native languages. Creating images of their homes, rituals, or creating other aspects of their visual and material cultures also was discouraged. Consequently art instruction was not usually a part of Indian education. However, some groups of people who were predominantly White AngloSaxons worked to change this government policy. …

In John Steinbeck’s early novel To a God Unknown, Juanito stands out as a unique Native American character. A half-white and half–Native American character who has received little scholarly attention, Juanito inhabits an in-between space, caught in the tension between the Western American standards of masculinity and the seemingly irresistible call to lose his individuality in a Native American collective unconscious. Juanito fights against racial stereotypes for the entirety of the novel, but in the end, with urging from Joseph Wayne, he unwillingly gives in to the unconscious Indian genetic predisposition that plagues all of Steinbeck’s Native American characters. Though Juanito’s internal battle against his two ideological halves and eventual loss of individuality is not portrayed without genuine pathos, it also reveals that in To a God Unknown, as well as in Steinbeck’s other works, race constitutes an internal quality as well as an external one, a quality that trumps individual decisions on the subject of identity. This article explores the relationships among self-determination, masculinity, and Native American identity by interacting with Carroll Britch and Cliff Lewis’s theory of Steinbeck’s collective Indian unconscious as well as Mimi Gladstein’s definition of American masculinity in Steinbeck’s era.

A Tribute to Paula Gunn Allen (1939–2008) Annette Van Dyke (bio) Out of her own body she pushedsilver thread, light, airand carried it carefully on the dark, flyingwhere nothing moved. Out of her body she extrudedshining wire, life, and wove the lighton the void. From beyond time,beyond oak trees and bright clear water flow,she was given the work of weaving the strandsof her body, her pain, her visioninto creation, and the gift of having created,to disappear. After her,the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life,memories of light and ladders,infinity-eyes, and rain.After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rugand mend the tear with string. Paula Gunn Allen, "Grandmother" [End Page 68] So goes one of Paula Gunn Allen's early published poems. "Grandmother" not only introduces the reader to Allen's particular Laguna Pueblo idea of the sacred but also defines her approach to her work as a scholar, poet, novelist, theorist, political activist, and professor: "After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug / and mend the tear with string." In the tradition of The Grandmother/Spider Woman/Thought Woman, Allen attempts to repair what has gone awry in her Native American culture while acknowledging that she is inadequate to the task. Nevertheless, Allen is rightly considered one of the founders of women's/Native American spirituality as an academic discipline, and, indeed, spirituality is central to her work. Her early scholarly work, her dissertation "Sipapu: A Cultural Perspective" (1975), became the exceedingly influential The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986). This text contains her 1975 germinal essay, "The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective," which was one of the first to detail the ritual function of Native American literatures as opposed to Euroamerican literatures. The Sacred Hoop is considered a foundation for the study not only of Native American gender but also of culture. Drawing upon Allen's own experience as a Laguna Pueblo woman, it calls attention to her belief in the power of the oral tradition now embodied in contemporary Native American literature to effect healing, survival, and continuance.1 Further, Allen's work discusses the importance of women not only in her own society but also across the Native American panorama and through time. Allen wrote from the perspective of a Laguna Pueblo woman from a culture in which the women are held in high respect. The descent is matrilineal—women owned the houses, and the primary deities are female. A major theme of Allen's work is delineation and restoration of this woman-centered culture. Elaborating on the roles and power of Native American women, Allen's "Who is Your Mother: Red Roots of White Feminism" came out in Sinister Wisdom in 1984. In this startling article, Allen articulated Native American contributions to democracy and feminism, countering a popular idea that a society in which women's power was equal to men's never existed. [End Page 69] She also has been a major champion to restore the place of gay and lesbian Native Americans, explaining their power as spiritual to be used for the good of the community. These ideas were first published in a groundbreaking essay in Conditions, "Beloved Women: Lesbians in American Indian Cultures" (1981), and then reworked for the Sacred Hoop. Allen's work abounds with the mythic dimensions of women's relationship to the sacred, as well as with the struggles of contemporary Native American women, many of whom have lost the respect formerly accorded to them because of the incursions of Euroamerican culture. Allen was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land-grant village abutting the Laguna and Acoma reservations and the Cibola National Forest. She referred to herself as a "multi-cultural event," recalling her Pueblo, Lakota, and Scottish ancestry from her mother, Ethel Haines Francis, and her Lebanese heritage from her father, Elias Lee Francis, a former lieutenant governor of New Mexico. These influences account for her ability to bridge perspectives and offer understandings across cultures, religions, and worldviews. She attended mission...

Native American identity work in settler colonial context

The traditional indigenous peoples of the Americas share much in common with indigenous peoples throughout the world who have been affected by the forces of globalization. At the same time the importance of their knowledge—spiritual, ecological, and social—retains its significance in this increasingly globalized world for myriad reasons. Among these are a respect for the natural environment and ecosystems that sustain life. Another is the quest for meaning in local traditions that is a counterpoint to modern development. Native American identity has been designated, decided upon, and forced upon Native Americans by social and political actions. This article focuses on Native American religious societies. First, it discusses the problem of definition and identity with respect to Native Americans. It then considers the diversity of Native American ways, creation stories based on “cosmovision,” sacred earth, sacred space, sacred sites, Native American identity through harmony with the land and life's cycles, Christianity and native traditions, and keeping Native American tradition intact in an era of globalization.

Elizabeth Warren has been a regular target for Trump, particularly her problematic Native American identity. Trump, an adherent to the idea of the ‘vanishing Indian’, has relentlessly mocked her claims to a Native American identity, delegitimising it by emphasising the concept of Indigenous racial purity. To complicate matters, Warren’s claims to a Native American identity have been rejected by many Native Americans. Based on vague family histories rather than cultural experience or a shared identity, Warren’s struggle with her own ethno-identity cast a light on an important phenomenon—Native American identity theft. This chapter examines Native American identity theft and the process of cultural appropriation that underpins it. It explores the ways in which the blood quantum has been used to create a national narrative which implies the eventual disappearance of Native Americans; and how that idea has helped to shape Trump’s approach to Warren. It also examines the ways in which imagery of Native Americans has evolved over the course of the twentieth century, helping to create an aspirational image that has proven itself attractive to many non-Indians who have gone on to claim, often without any basis in reality, an Indigenous identity of their own.

The aim of the current study was to utilize a structural model to examine simultaneously the relationships among socioeconomic status (SES), anxiety sensitivity, stress, psychological problems, Native American identity, cultural related anxiety, and coping. The proposed structural equation model was tested using AMOS (Analysis of Moment Structures). The social stress literature provided a theoretical framework; it suggests that SES-linked social stressors that result in higher levels of psychological disorders adversely affect people from lower SES backgrounds. Data were gathered from 150 Native American attendees at a Pow-Wow. SES was hypothesized to impact negatively on anxiety sensitivity. Anxiety sensitivity was predicted to positively influence perceived stress; perceived stress was predicted to positively influence psychological problems. Culturally related anxiety was predicted to positively influence perceived stress, whereas Native American identity was anticipated to have an inverse relationship to culturally related anxiety. Finally, certain coping styles were predicted to negatively affect psychological problems. Results indicated that psychological problems in Native Americans are influenced sequentially by a variety of social and psychological factors. As SES became higher in Native Americans, their anxiety sensitivity was lower. When their anxiety sensitivity and culturally related anxiety were heightened, it influenced perceived stress, which affected an increase in psychological problems. Uniquely, culturally related anxiety was found to influence stress, along with anxiety sensitivity, in a causal path leading to psychological problems. Additionally, certain coping styles influenced psychological problems. The adequacy of this model, how findings relate to Native American mental health, limitations, implications for practice, and future directions are discussed.

In Anglo social and religious culture, personal biological characteristics of exceptionality result in social attributions of inferiority, reduced social responsibility and reduced status. In Native American social and religious culture, these same personal characteristics result in social attributions and expectations of extraordinary ability, increased social responsibility, and honored status. A principle shared by both, however, is that the Life experience of each person can be a Divine Calling. Religious and socio-cultural attributions operate as independent variables of socialization asserting far stronger effects upon the real life outcomes of human exceptionality than biology ever may. Assumptions of Selfhood and of exceptionality within Native American Spirituality and North American Christianity are compared and contrasted, proposing an analysis using the bell curve in an unorthodox manner to unify both perspectives. Specific examples are drawn from the author's own experience as a full professor and academic chair, psychologist, minister, elder and seer of Mohawk Native American ancestry, and as a person who grew up as a retarded, severely multiply disabled child receiving the socialization of both cultures and belief systems. The author concludes with a proposal that we return to the shared principle of each culture: that the life experience of each person can be a Divine Calling. This principle is illustrated through her successful interventions with severely disabled children, one of whom she has adopted. It is suggested that we do not use our religions, our sciences, our belief systems, our cultures, as weapons of reductionistic authoritarianism that diminish the quality and potential of any human life.

Reviewed by: Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin Penelope Kelsey Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $26.95. Mark Rifkin's Beyond Settler Sovereignty offers a series of important critical insights as it brings the theoretical body of queer temporalities into conversation with the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. In the first chapter, Rifkin relies upon non-Native theorists like Henri Bergson, Lauren Berlant, Albert Einstein, Johannes Fabian, and Elizabeth Freeman to lay groundwork for understanding settler heteronormative conceptions of time; he then engages Native American and Indigenous studies scholars like Kevin Bruyneel, Mishuana Goeman, Deborah Miranda, Audra Simpson, Dale Turner, Robert Warrior, and others to build parameters for understanding how Indigenous formulations of time might differ and proceeds to debunk the myth of a "global 'coevalness'" (21). In fact, Rifkin warns, to insist upon a shared experience of time between settler and Indigene "reduces the immanent trajectories of indigeneity (processes of Native becoming) to a set of points—the supposedly shared now of the present, modernity, national history, and so on" (26). In this chapter, Rifkin also sets up important theoretical concepts that he will track throughout the book like storying and backgrounding. In his second chapter, Rifkin opens with an anecdote about viewing the film Lincoln and its silent portrayal of Seneca hahësnowa:nëh (Chief) Ely S. Parker, a representation that he finds ultimately stands for Native peoples' struggles for sovereignty and the ways in which Native American identity precludes inclusion in a national narrative that centralizes the Civil War as integral to becoming. For Rifkin, Lincoln's imagining of the Civil War and its meaning can be better apprehended by analyzing "how periodization participates [End Page 323] in the storying and unfolding of national time, giving shape to the present and the sense of its potentials by reactivating . . . an inherent perceptual tradition" (50). Rifkin traces a process he calls the emancipation sublime and uses it to denote the war's meaning as a vehicle for making apparent the state's inherent democracy, a process that disallows Native peoples' inclusion in the "temporality of the union" (51–52). Rifkin's argument is convincing in many ways, but would be helped by spending time on the intersections of "the union" and Parker's role in both it and the Iroquois Confederacy, given the founding fathers' employment of Hodinöhšö:ni:h governance as a template for designing US democracy. This concern is a minor quibble in a book spilling over with impressive insights about Indigenous temporalities and their relationship to sovereignty, however. Rifkin concludes the chapter with an analysis of non-Native depictions of Indigenous military actions in the 1862 Dakota Conflict as "temporally exceptional" (67). In the third chapter, Rifkin analyzes how allotment sought to impose settler temporality upon Native people through its enforcement of nuclear family structures, individualized land ownership, and participation in a cash economy and its dismantling of traditional forms of governance and cultural expression (namely clothing, language, religion, gender). Focusing upon John Joseph Mathews's novel Sundown, Rifkin argues its main character Chal's "feeling of queerness" as he comes of age attests to "the emergence and persistence of modes of perception, experience, and memory that link Osage people to that place" (98–99). Rifkin explores the Osage mineral estate as furnishing "a basis for common experiences of time" and reflecting a "duration of peoplehood," in spite of allotment efforts to divide Osage lands and dissolve these ties. Rifkin concludes that Mathews's portrayal of Osage people during the "Great Frenzy" gestures toward Osage ways of occupying the land that emphasize silences and "becoming," and depicts signal markers of Osage temporalities that run counter to American development narratives. Rifkin's fourth chapter centers on portrayals of the Ghost Dance in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens [End Page 324] in the Dunes, focusing on the role of prophecy, cross-temporality, and asynchrony in Indigenous temporal formations that he terms prophetic temporality. Rifkin sees Alexie's deployment of the Ghost Dance as an...

A (Mexican) Native American Rock Band:Redbone, Racial Legibility, and Native-Chicanx Intimacy Jedediah Kuhn (bio) Redbone is one of the most successful Native American bands in the history of rock 'n' roll. They emerged onto the U.S. music scene in 1970 with music that spoke directly to the burgeoning Red Power movement.1 Hits such as "Come and Get Your Love" and "The Witch-Queen of New Orleans" topped the charts in the United States, Canada, and Europe and still receive regular airplay today.2 Brothers Patrick (Pat) and Candido (Lolly) Vegas founded the band and served as its core members. In his memoir, Come and Get Your Love: A Celebratory Ode to Redbone (1939-Present), Pat Vegas traces his and Lolly's ascent to rock stardom. Vegas also reveals something perhaps unexpected in the memoir of a Native American musician: in addition to being Native, Pat Vegas is Mexican American. In fact, several of the band's members are both Native and Mexican American, and Vegas's memoir as well as the band's music, albums, and performances point to continual intimacies between Native Americans and Mexican Americans.3 Pat Vegas's Mexican American heritage as well as that of Redbone's other band members rub against both popular and scholarly notions of "authentic" Native American and Indigenous identity and presents a new vantage point from which to think about Native American-Chicanx relationality. Whereas scholars have examined the numerous overlaps between these groups in the nineteenth century and earlier, work examining the twentieth century often focuses on one group or the other. Further, in the few places where scholars do examine relations between these groups, they focus on analyzing the Chicano Movement's claim of Indigenous status, a claim many scholars, especially those [End Page 11] working under the rubric of critical Latinx indigeneities and critical ethnic studies, have problematized as perpetuating the marginalization of Indigenous peoples on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Indeed, in the interest of supporting Indigenous rights in the United States and Mexico, this study agrees with this emerging scholarship that it is important not to conflate Indigenous status—which pertains to a political category designating the first peoples within settler states—and Indigenous descent in the way that the Chicano Movement has done in the past. What this study problematizes, however, is the collapsing of all discussion of Native-Chicanx relationality into the question of the Chicano Movement's (mis)uses of indigeneity. Instead, this essay turns to intimacy as a framework to rethink Native American-Chicanx relations. I argue that the case of Redbone reveals glimpses of a long, continual history of intimacy between Native Americans and Mexican Americans as well as the oppressive demands for authenticity that delimit Native American identity and render such intimacies illegible. This study explores traces of intimacy between Native Americans and Chicanxs through an analysis of a sampling of cultural texts produced by Redbone and Pat Vegas during the band's 1970s heyday, including music, lyrics, performances, and visual representation on album covers as well as Pat Vegas's 2017 self-published memoir Come and Get Your Love: A Celebratory Ode to Redbone (1939-Present). Vegas's memoir moves chronologically, tracing his and Lolly's early years and family life, their time as backing musicians in Los Angeles, and their rise (and fall) as members of Redbone. The memoir emphasizes these early years, covering the post-1970s period, including Lolly's passing in 2010, in one brief chapter. The final portion of the book includes appendices written by friends and former band members, such as Pete DePoe and Butch Rillera, and argues explicitly for the band's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Scholars have long turned to popular culture, popular music in particular, as a critical site where marginalized groups articulate difference to resist the dominant national culture's attempts to assimilate them.4 Redbone is particularly appropriate for this study because, as a prominent Native American band emerging at the height of the Red Power movement, they can easily be read as articulating Native American resistance to U.S. oppression; however, they also gesture to something more...

124 Western American Literature Growing UpNativeAmerican: An Anthology. Edited by Patricia Riley. Foreword by Ines Hernandez. (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993. 333 pages, $23.00.) A good anthology inspires its reader to seek out more of each author’s work. In this respect, Patricia Riley’s collection succeeds admirably. In an exploration of the question “What does it mean to grow up Native American?” Riley has gathered twenty-two essays and stories about childhood. Spanning two centuries, the selections from fifteen tribal nations offer a balance of male and female experiences. Although many of the pieces come from well-known books, for example Black Elk Speaks and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, the anthology contains a number of fresh works, such as Eric Gansworth’s “The Ballad of Plastic Fred” and Louis Owens’s “Water Witch.”When Riley includes excerpts, she provides ample-sized selections, avoiding the temptation to offer more authors by giving fewer pages to each. (Nevertheless, a few absences, such as Charles Eastman and Mourning Dove, are puzzling.) Ines Hernandez contributes an excellent foreword which articulates a number of the issues involved in Native American identity, and Simon Ortiz’s essay “The Language We Know” elo­ quently addresses the issue of Native Americans writing in English. The fasci­ nation of the book comes from listening to how these diverse pieces speak to one another. The collection is divided into four parts: Going Forward, Looking Back; The Nineteenth Century; Schooldays; and Twentieth Century. This organiza­ tion is somewhat weak because the sections don’t coalesce as complete units. Although each section has an introduction, these are too brief to fulfill their task. Riley clearly wants the reader’s attention focused on the authors’ work, but it would help if she would provide more of an overall framework. Itwould also be useful ifRileywould explain her decision to mingle fiction and autobiography. She seems to equate the two forms, using both for their “narratives” about childhood, yet she doesn’t offer a rationale for doing so. Nor is there an explanation for the exclusion of poetry, and its absence is particularly puzzling because Joseph Bruchac’s use of a poem in “Notes of a Translator’s Son”demonstrates its appropriateness. Overall, Growing Up Native American is a worthwhile thematic collection, and it fulfills the editor’s desire to show the “commonality and diversity of Native American experience.” JOSEPH MILLS University ofCalifornia, Davis ...

D' Arcy McNickle's novel Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978) begins: The Indian named Bull and his grandson took a walk into the mountains to look at a dam built in a cleft of rock, and what began as a walk became a journey into the (1995, l).1 As with most journeys, and as dis tinct from wanderings and well-practiced travels to familiar places, the journey portrayed by McNickle depends upon of various kinds to chart and negotiate unknown territory. In the novel, McNickle describes maps of the mind that provide strategies for comprehending and nego tiating the world, often in vastly different ways. Specifically, in Wind, these are conceptual shaped by cultural histories and experiences, and they determine the dynamics of intercultural encounters, the focus of the story. We will argue that even as McNickle presents a chronicle of contact and communication between Native American and European American people, he offers a theoretical assessment of the different kinds of mapping used at these points of contact and their consequences. McNickle's narrative centers on the issues of colonialism, Native American identity, self-determination, and cultural survival. Alternative ways of mapping the world both create and provide resolutions to these problems. Historically, have been essential resources in the process of colonialism; knowing indigenous people meant mapping them in locations relative to the colonizers. With came the possi bility of exploitation, dispossession, and assimilation. McNickle's use of as metaphors evokes this violent history. But even as these con tending colonial lead to tragedy, the story dramatically proposes

10. Trends in Image and DesignReflections on 25 Years of a Tribal Museum Era Patricia Pierce Erikson (bio) Although precedents to contemporary tribal museums emerged in the early 19th and 20th centuries, Native American communities founded their own museums predominantly in the latter half of the 20th century. The Makah Indian community of Washington State was one of them. Now in its 25th year, the Makah Cultural and Research Center (MCRC) shares the title of tribal museum with more than one hundred nationwide (Cooper 1996; Fuller and Fabricius 1994). The MCRC's 25th anniversary, marked by the exhibit, Clothing: Trends in Image and Design, is one of many important benchmarks in an era of tribal museums. The proliferation of tribal museums has coincided with a period when anthropology, including museum anthropology, has critically analyzed how power relationships have shaped the methodology, ethics, and research design of the disciplines (Marcus and Fischer 1986; Rosaldo 1993). Native American "source communities" have sought to clearly define and disseminate members' lifestyles, values, and concerns for themselves and the public. The result has been widespread development of community-based museums or collaborative representational projects (Phillips 2003). A large body of work crossing social sciences and humanities has argued that an imperial vision has for centuries distorted images and understandings of colonized people, reducing indigenous notions of humanity to Eurocentric constructions of an "authentic Other" (e.g., Fabian 1983; Said 1978). The academic study and representation of indigenous peoples has remained part of an ongoing legacy of this imperialism (Tuhiwai Smith 2002). Creating idealized versions of specifically Native American identity—some noble, some savage—has been part of this larger process. The appropriation and stereotyping of Native American identity have contributed to processes of nation-building and individual and collective identity production. Historically, "staging Indianness" has helped European Americans to create a uniquely "American" (as opposed to [End Page 271] European) identity (e.g., Deloria 1998), or a more "authentic" American identity for one region relative to another (Gleach 2003), or a nostalgic, antimodern identity. These appropriations have been accomplished through a creative, political practice that is older than the nation itself (Taylor 1990). The stereotypes inherent in representing Indianness and "playing Indian" have repeatedly overwritten the existence and persistence of actual Native American communities. As stereotypes, they replace complex and dynamic identities with often static and anachronistic pan- or pastiche Indian ones. Frequently, the "imagined Indian" has inhered to persistent narrations of Native American extinction (Hill 2000). Over time many of these modes of representation have become embedded in a variety of institutional practices, particularly those of museums (e.g., Hinsley 1994; Krech and Hail 1999; Ames 1992; Clifford 1991; Maurer 2000). Over the course of more than two centuries, however, American museums have diversified, reevaluated their social roles, and developed new exhibition strategies. Given the range of museums of art, history, natural history, ethnology, technology, and so forth, there is clearly no single concept of "the museum." Nonetheless, it is possible to map how various tropes and types of exhibition have structured the museum-going public's experience of distinctions, for example, those between "art" and "artifact" (Clifford 1988; Nason 2000; Penney 2000). It is also possible to discern how these conventions have been resisted or appropriated and modified by a growing cadre of Native American museologists and social scientists and some of their non-Native colleagues. Although Native American protests and resistance to ethnographic study, collecting, and exhibition began early in colonial and national history, these objections intensified and became more overt in the context of civil rights and feminist movements in the 1960s. Since that time, a wide array of Native American activists, scholars, and artists have challenged how their communities have been researched, analyzed, collected, and represented through ethnographies and museum installations (Cooper 1996). For decades Native American communities have complained that social scientific interpretations of cultural history have overlapped little with Native American oral history or perspectives (Mihesuah and Wilson 2004); moreover, the research process has been neither collaborative nor inclusive, and its objectives have seemed irrelevant to contemporary life (Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997). One of the many ways that Native communities have responded is to counteract Eurocentric depictions...

279 Book Reviews The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island: A History. By John A. Strong. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011, 352 pages, $29.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Marsha Hamilton, University of South Alabama The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island is a narrative account of the Unkechaug from before contact with Europeans to the present day, thus John A. Strong organizes his material into a comprehensive chronological story. Several important themes emerge from this account. The first theme emphasizes the persistence of the Unkechaug, and by extension other Native Americans, through time. Although nineteenthcentury writers tended to romanticize Native Americans and published accounts about a tribe’s “last member,” many Native groups retained a strong sense of their identity. Strong argues that for the Unkechaugs that identity was rooted in their ability to retain a small reservation on Long Island’s South Shore. No matter how far away tribe members might go in search of work, they always had a place to which they could return. Strong builds on two additional themes. He illustrates that the Unkechaug were always part of the larger community. Over an extended period, they maintained strong relationships with the Floyds and Smiths, two of the most important landed and political families in the region. Unkechaugs worked for these families for centuries and the politically-connected patriarchs of these families protected them, although rather paternalistically . The Unkechaug also had economic and religious connections to other community members. They were not isolated from their EuropeanAmerican or African-American neighbors. Indeed, the Unkechaug intermarried quite often with African-Americans. These unions lead Strong to address the theme of identity and persistence. In so doing, he argues that Native American identity is cultural, not based strictly on bloodlines. 280 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY People of racially and ethnically mixed heritages are still Indians; nonIndian forebears do not negate Native culture and identity. Thus, the Unkechaug married “outsiders” and brought them into their cultural orbit, much as Native Americans had done for centuries, as can be seen in the Iroquois “mourning wars,” for example. The Unkechaug also adapted elements of European-American culture and religion, shaping these ideas to mesh with their own worldview. In the end, these helped them to persist as a people. The book’s fourth theme demonstrates that the Unkechaug, much like Native Americans elsewhere, were not passive victims of Europeans. They fought to shape the world created by interactions among Natives, Europeans, and Africans in ways that were amenable to their worldview. Of course, this is not a new theme in Native American historiography, but it is one that tends to be overlooked in textbooks and other works designed for a general audience. This is one of the strengths of Strong’s book. It is written for general readers; therefore, it provides a connection between scholarly circles, where an interpretation or argument might be well-known, and a wider audience of readers. The book’s scope is also one of its strengths, since the major themes are supported simply through the broad span of time covered. Readers will find it impossible to impose artificial boundaries for these issues: Native Americans existed until the turn of the eighteenth century and then disappeared, or through the American Revolution, or until 1876–1877 and the end of the “Indian Wars” in the western United States. Through this book, one sees that Native Americans have been a force in U.S. history all along, at the local and national levels. Another strength of the book is its source base. Strong grounds his work on an extensive collection of primary documents, including interviews and oral histories that he and Unkechaug leaders compiled to fight a civil suit filed in Federal court against the tribe in 2007. The source base, therefore, is as complete as possible, given the nature of the records, the unsystematic record-keeping of earlier eras, and the survival rate of the records that were kept. Although this book is a comprehensive history of the Unkechaug, a small tribe that rarely participated in events of a national scope, the themes and issues addressed can be applied broadly. The focus on a small group allows a very...