Reviews reviews Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity by Andrew H. Fisher University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2010. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 344 pages. $24.95 paper. Andrew Fisher documents the history of the “Columbia River Indians,” descendants of Indians who lived on the shores of the Columbia River between what were once the Cascades, now beneath the reservoir formed by Bonneville Dam,and Priest Rapids,flooded by the dam of the same name.When Governor I.I. Stevens and Agent Joel Palmer negotiated treaties with these and allied Indians in 1855, they were forced to cede their homes here and assigned to reservations set well back from the “Big River” — as the Columbia is known in the Sahaptin language — out of the way of the flood of Euro-American settlement.Not all these Indians, however, accepted reservation life.Indian families held onto their river homes at winter villages such as Priest Rapids, Hanford , Alderdale, Roosevelt, Rock Creek, Celilo, and Sk’in and at in lieu fishing sits at Lone Pine, Underwood, and Little White Salmon village. Eventually, most were enrolled with one of the several treaty tribes that had been carved out of the complex fabric of Columbia River Indian life by Stevens and Palmer.All had relatives who lived on local reservations, but their primary loyalties remained at the river. They resisted or evaded every effort by federal and state authorities to remove them, eventually gaining legal recognition of their right not only to fish at their “usual and accustomed places” — from the 1855 treaty language — but to be at home there. Fisher’s history is meticulous and nuanced, fully acknowledging the complex social and political currents within and around these “renegade” Indian communities. He credits their determination and intelligence as key to the successful legal battles waged for the recognition of the treaty rights of Indians to fish “in common” with non-Indian citizens. He suggests, as well, that these“River Indians” in many cases guarded traditional language, environmental knowledge, and worldview more closely than their reservation-based kin. Fisher combines the skills and perspectives of a historian and an anthropologist. As a historian, he extracts surprising details from archival documents that anthropologists often ignore, including personal correspondence of government officials and individual Native and non-Native residents and records of homestead allotments and litigation that show this history to be not just a history of the displacement of the Indians by white settlers, but also of their complex and at times contradictory interactions .Fisher also has ferreted out oral histories recorded by individual Columbia River Indians telling their stories in their own words,making this history more ethnographic, more faithful to all those caught up in this history. Fisher begins with an ethnographic reconstruction of Indian life along the Columbia at first white contact. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left a rich record of visits and observations as they descended the Columbia from the Snake River to the Pacific in the fall of 1805, returning along nearly the same route the next spring. At that time there were no “tribes” here, just a string of well-populated, closely allied villages and fishing camps. Lewis and Clark recognized“chiefs,”presenting them with presidential medals, but they could not appreciate the complex social and political weave of aboriginal Plateau Indian society. Fisher then details the well-known story of introduced disease, fur-trader dealings, Christian missionary efforts, and the flood of OHQ vol. 111, no. 4 settlers down the Oregon Trail that set the stage for the treaty councils of 1855. As Fisher notes, many “Indian” histories end with the treaties, the presumption being that Indians dutifully removed to their assigned reservations to be assimilated into mainstreamAmerican society. The treaty councils,however,are just the beginning of Fisher’s story, not the beginning of the end. The treaties created“treaty tribes”— The Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla and Warm Springs Reservations — with all the rights reserved to those tribes by treaty. The “Columbia River Indians” are not mentioned in the treaties. They are a“Shadow Tribe,”descendants of“renegade Indians”who, in the decades post-treaty, opted out of reservation...