Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. By Raymond I. Orr

Abstract

While many researchers have dealt with political relations between the federal government and American Indian nations, fewer have tackled the more sensitive subject of intra-tribal politics. In this challenging book, Raymond I. Orr examines three nations—the Citizen Potawatomi, the Isleta Pueblo, and the Rosebud Sioux—to understand how trauma has influenced their economic development. Orr argues that trauma not only persists “at the collective polity level decades and centuries after the initial traumatizing events” but that it prompts “the… rise of the melancholic worldview, which is the drive to reject self-interest in favor of furthering individual and collective mourning” (p. 9). One of Orr’s most significant claims is that intra-tribal conflict, rather than inter-ethnic conflict with non-Natives, is the larger issue affecting Native Americans today. Citing works such as Andrea Smith's Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), the author claims the field of indigenous studies not only distorts the level of violence committed by non-Natives but it moves “hagiographically” by focusing on non-Native violence and suppressing the role of intra-tribal violence as a serious issue (pp. 43, 48). According to Orr, tribes have developed on a spectrum depending on three factors: how undisturbed they are, how often they have been exposed to wealth creation opportunities, and how often they have been exposed to traumatic events. While the Isleta Pueblos have been largely undisturbed in Orr’s view, fostering self-interest, the Lakotas have experienced high trauma, fostering melancholia, while the Citizen Pottawatomi have competing factions of melancholia and self-interest. These worldviews affect tribal affairs on a daily basis and play a more regular role in tribal life than outside violence according to Orr.