Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History

Abstract

This book deals with such an important topic, I was glad to see some scholar take it up, and even better when that scholar was Alexandra Harmon. Like Harmon's important first book, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (1998), Rich Indians emphasizes the embedded contradictions within a historical phenomenon, in this case the association of wealth with power. Attuned to myriad subtleties and ironies, Rich Indians persuasively argues that ideas about wealth and power have been morally ambiguous in both Euro-American and Native American societies. Individuals could accumulate wealth and expect that with wealth came power, but when such individuals exceeded culturally defined allowances, they could be punished with a backlash of moral outrage. Contributing to this moral ambiguity was a persistent ideology, held by non-Indians, and many Indians also, that characterized real Indians as lacking economic motivation and sophistication. Harmon investigates this idea within a large geographic and chronological framework, beginning with the arrival of English settlers at Jamestown, Virginia, in the early seventeenth century and ending with the proliferation of tribal casinos throughout the United States. Chapters in between focus on several of the wealthiest and most politically influential eastern Indians in the eighteenth century; debates over wealth, political leadership, and racial heritage in the Southeast during the removal period; Indian entrepreneurship in Indian Territory during the land boom years of the late nineteenth century, which uses material also found in Harmon's June 2003 JAH article “American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age”; the Osage oil boom of the early twentieth century; and fluctuating perceptions of Indian poverty and dependency in the mid-twentieth century. Essentially, Harmon has reenvisioned the past four hundred years of American and American Indian history around the observation that the pursuit of wealth and power, ameliorated by moral skepticism, has been a fundamental feature of the social fabric. While Harmon cites many instances of individual Indians accumulating wealth and power or expressing frustration at having their economic efforts thwarted by stereotypes, she is more interested in how Indians have, over such a long period of time, received the brunt of moral censure.