Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887

Abstract

For evidence of the persistent precariousness of tribal sovereignty within the recent United States political sphere one does not need to reach as far back as George W. Bush’s 2004 pratfall attempt at defining the term. As recently as September 2015, Republican Party presidential candidate Rand Paul suggested that Native Americans “don’t do very well because there’s been a lack of assimilation.” Such an appraisal remains frustrating and frightening, but not surprising. Federal Indian policies have long been cloaked in different shades of sheep’s wool, but their cumulative agenda, if not effect, has remained relatively consistent: cultural assimilation by way of either subtle or overt blows against tribal sovereignty. Meanwhile, if we turn this asymmetrical power relation on its head, and instead focus on tribal nations’ overarching and enduring policy initiative, it too has remained consistent: sovereignty and nationhood. Unlike their fellow treaty signatories, however, tribal nations never packaged their agenda in false advertising.Twentieth-century ethnohistory expert Daniel M. Cobb borrows a quote from the influential Dakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. for the title of his excellent new edited document collection, Say We Are Nations. Focusing more on politics than policies, it demonstrates Native American intellectuals’ and activists’ long tradition of engaging the surrounding majority society and wider world on Indigenous terms, for Indigenous purposes, and not at the expense of Indigeneity. Across five chapters, Cobb has arranged a total of fifty-five primary sources—including speeches, interviews, letters, essays, congressional testimonies, student writings, and more—that encompass tribal nations from throughout North America (Alaska and Hawai‘i included), and range chronologically from the 1887 Dawes Act to our present “uncertain times” (204). Forming a picture of resolute exercises in sovereignty, self-determination, and nationhood, these documents “respond to the presumption of indigenous incorporation and disappearance with a collective ‘not so fast’” (250).Just browsing this volume’s table of contents during an initial thumbing-through reveals an impressive number of unfamiliar and unpublished sources. Consider for example a 1919 letter from “obedient” Standing Rock Sioux leaders to Indian Commissioner Cato Sells requesting a removal of restrictions against the traditional grass dance, before inviting him to their upcoming Fourth of July celebration; a Tlingit couple’s letter to the Alaskan territorial governor that advocated a double victory for Native people at home and abroad during World War II; or the provocative and revealing essays by students of Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas’s late-1950s/early-1960s summer American Indian Affairs workshops. Culled exclusively from archives, the material concerning debates on the Indian Reorganization Act is especially impressive in its expression of competing assessments.As with any document collection, some readers are bound to take issue with omissions or uneven coverage. Yet, Cobb confesses that these are not “the great documents in American politics and protest since 1887” (5). Exhaustive coverage was less his aim than was an arrangement of both competing and cooperating voices that form an “intricate fugue,” to borrow his musical term. He succeeded most admirably.Say We Are Nations is an outstanding classroom resource—one that should generate lively discussions among students both uninitiated and familiar with the topic. (Cobb road-tested this material in his own courses.) Moreover, it will be of great value for professional scholarship on Indian intellectual history, activism, sovereignty, self-determination, economic development, postcolonial resistance, and, of course, politics. Indeed, while this compendium forms a compelling survival story, the resonant voices within certainly would remind us that there is still much work to be done in hearing the complicated convictions of generations of Indigenous activists who have fought to gain a seat at the table. Say We Are Nations is a great place to begin.