Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination by Laurie Arnold

Abstract

 Reviews ing into account the inextricable relationships between labour and landscape and by accepting Latino immigrants as integral players in forests and rural communities can we hope to have land management policies that promote both forest health and environmental justice” (p. 75). Sarathy effectively demonstrates the pineros’ marginalization, their experience of labor abuses,untimelyorabsentpay,uncompensated injury, and fear of deportation, along with the difficulties they face defending their interests due to language barriers and racial prejudice — including the arguably most benign manifestation of racism in the treatment of Oregon’s Latinos by the mainstream press more as “cultural spectacle” than as full human beings. On that score, Sarathy devotes a chapter to Latino workers’ organizational efforts beyond the southern Oregon woods, ranging from labor unionism — for example, the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) — to immigration advocacy and service provision. By drawing regional and occupational comparisons, Sarathy poses provocative questions about the conditions under which self-activity — identifying a problem and taking action on one’s own behalf to address it — is more or less likely to occur. Sarathy’s Pineros is an excellent book, well researched and compassionate. The author holds a doctorate in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California at Berkeley,and her field of expertise has rightfully shaped her approach. A geographer or historian would likely be interested in placing Pineros in a broader spatial or temporal context.Interestingcomparisonsmay be drawn by reading Don Mitchell’s Lie of the Land (Minnesota ,1996) regarding California’s farm workers — a book Sarathy mentions — and another she does not: Gunther Peck’s Reinventing Free Labor (Cambridge, 2000) about immigrant workers and labor contractors in theAmerican West a century ago. Pineros is recommended for anyone interested in labor and immigrant rights and environmental justice. Philip Dreyfus San Francisco State University Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: the Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination by Laurie Arnold University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2012. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 208 pages. $24.95 paper. At a 1965 Congressional hearing on the proposed termination of the Colville Confederated Tribes, Margaret Piotote boiled down the view of many culturally traditional elders:“We have a beautiful reservation. It is worth more than money” (p. 90). Some readers may be surprised that termination battles continued at such a late date, but the length of the Colville struggle is only one of many important revelations brought forward by Laurie Arnold in her fascinating case study of the post–World War II federal policy that was so destructive to Native peoples. Piotote spoke in opposition to the many members of Congress from both parties who, for over two decades,advocated the end of government support for tribes and the elimination of tribal governments and reservations.Yet she also faced opposition at home:termination was pushed relentlessly over many years by Colville people themselves — or, rather, by certain people and organizations within the diverse and complex reservation community. Arnold’s history reveals that those factions represented a tribal majority from about 1956 to at least 1968, when the elected Colville Business Council drafted the last of the proposed termination bills and resolutions that frame her book. As late as 1967, a Bureau of Indian Affairs poll revealed that 73 percent of enrolled  OHQ vol. 114, no. 1 Colville adults still supported termination. Arnold points out some complications. Many (perhaps most) supporters lived outside the reservation. In addition, 30 percent of tribal members simply did not participate in the 1967, or earlier, surveys. Arnold suggests that many opponents were more oriented to traditional cultural practices and values and may have been expressing their opposition in the old way of withdrawal from the process. Nevertheless,even if all nonparticipants in the 1967 poll were in fact opposed to termination, simple math shows that supporters constituted a majority. Pro-terminationists, furthermore, dominated the elected business council until 1971. More convincing analyses — made by anti-terminationists at the time and by Arnold herself — argue that many pro-termination Colvilles did not understand the full import of the proposed laws. Arnold makes clear that Colvilles were not unique in advocating for their own termination .Majorities expressed support at Klamath, Menominee...