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Book Review
| A Nation of Statesmen: The Political Culture of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans, 1815–1872. By James W. Oberly. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005, xv + 336 pp. Maps, tables, charts, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)
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Amazing as it seems in the twenty-first century, the history of some tribal nations remains largely untold. James W. Oberly admirably fills that gap for Wisconsin's Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans with this political analysis of tribal displacement, conflict and, ultimately, survival. He "explain[s] their ethnic survival as an American Indian people through their ceaseless engagement with politics on all levels" (p. 18). |
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Oberly builds his analysis using two rubrics: a tripartite division of political interaction of federal, intertribal, and intratribal relations and a chronological periodization of Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican history. In each of the seven eras Oberly identifies, which form the structure of the work, he details the tribe's successes and failures in shaping its destiny. Beginning in New York, Oberly follows the removal to Wisconsin, where the tribe amalgamated and divided and where it lost and gained land bases and faced removal and political disintegration. Throughout, a series of leaders shaped the tribal definition of their future—one in which they secured a homeland and maintained a distinct culture incorporating both traditional tribal and modern American ways. |
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