NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Reviews 187 SETH SCHERMERHORN At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak and Laura Tuennerman University of Arizona Press, 2013 IN ADDITION TO WRITING Tohono O’odham history into more nuanced and theoretically sophisticated interpretations of Native American history than has previously been available, Andrae M. Marak and Laura Teunnerman’s At the Border of Empires masterfully tells “the story of an uncompleted quest for full assimilation” of the Tohono O’odham, a transnational Indigenous people who live along the U.S.–Mexico border that arbitrarily cut Tohono O’odham homelands in half in 1853. Highlighting the themes of imperialism, gender, and Indigenous agency, Marak and Teunnerman deftly illustrate the unintended consequences of gendered assimilation efforts in which U.S. assimilation efforts occurred not in spite of, but rather because of, the peripheral location of the Tohono O’odham. Like other Native American peoples who were often seen as weak, corruptible “proto-citizens,” imperial eyes saw the Tohono O’odham as requiring protection from influences of the “wrong sort.” Indeed, the perceived need to protect Tohono O’odham from “vices” was part of the rationale for the creation of the Papago Indian Reservation, today called the Tohono O’odham Nation, in 1916 on the U.S. side of the international border. The key theoretical category of this study is “negotiation,” which, much like Gilbert Joseph’s “encounter,” focuses on “the deployment and contestation of power” (1–2). Crucially, because of this process of negotiation in the differential assimilation of Tohono O’odham in the United States and Mexico, assimilation (in a Gramscian key) is necessarily incomplete. As the authors state in their conclusion, “Negotiation—defined to include everything from exchange and borrowing to circumvention and passive resistance—resulted in efforts at assimilation that were incomplete, complicated, and sometimes unexpected in their application and outcomes” (143). The book is topically organized. The introduction presents the category of negotiation and situates the book in relation to previous historical scholarship . The first chapter provides a brief historical and cultural background on the Tohono O’odham. Chapters 2 to 5 constitute the body of the work, each taking on a theme of gendered assimilation efforts: vice, marriage, schools, and vocation. Chapter 2 examines divergent O’odham and non-O’odham views of “vice,” particularly focusing on the consumption of alcohol. Given Reviews NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 188 the paucity of O’odham commentaries on alcohol, and the inverse relationship between rivers and wine drinking posited in the chapter’s epigraph, the analysis of Tohono O’odham nawait i’ita (saguaro cactus) wine drinking ceremonies and attitudes toward drinking more generally in this chapter would benefit substantially from the cultural and historical insights gained from Don Bahr’s How Mockingbirds Are.1 Chapter 3 examines sex and marriage as areas of “contestation, assimilation, and resistance” (49). The analysis of the Office of Indian Affairs’ (OIA) definition of marriage as “heterosexual, monogamous , lifelong, and sanctioned by law . . . patriarchal, consensual, and Christian,” is particularly effective in illustrating how the implementation of colonial policies undermined marriage in an “Indian way” (52). The authors also analyze the ironic situation of OIA field matrons promoting marriage for O’odham women, though not for themselves, as a crucial part of the assimilation process. Chapter 4 examines the striking failures of education as a means of assimilation . A few items worthy of note include the institutional opposition against Tohono O’odham pilgrimages to Magdalena, a student hunger strike against a harsh English-only rule in 1920 at the Santa Rosa day school, and the written observations of Antonia Garcia, a Tohono O’odham student at Topawa, on the “Holy Week Devils” in Cowlic in the 1930s, which is a valuable , though previously unutilized, O’odham contribution to the intriguing literature on O’odham jejawul, or “devils.” Chapter 5 focuses on the highly gendered, strategic entrance of the Tohono O’odham into the cash economy. The chapter especially examines the roles of field matrons from the 1890s through 1920s, and their intention to transform Tohono O’odham women into “good housewives” who are dependent on wage-earning...