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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Allison Fuss Mellis. Riding Buffaloes and Broncos: Rodeo and Native Traditions in the Northern Great Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 266. $34.95.
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| Over the past decade, scholars have created a body of work that reexamines the federal government's efforts to assimilate Native Americans since the late nineteenth century. This work has explored how indigenous people themselves responded to, resisted, and subverted assimilation by using the very institutions and practices meant to undermine tribal sovereignty. Many studies have focused upon boarding schools created for American Indian children that were intended to teach them Anglo-Protestant values and identities. Allison Fuss Mellis makes a significant contribution to this scholarship with her cultural history of Native American rodeo among the northern Great Plains tribes. |
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Unlike other studies of assimilation among Native Americans, Mellis's book explores a practice that is not directly connected to the boarding school experience. Instead, the growth of rodeos is more a product of another federal policy intended to promote assimilation: the concentration of indigenous Americans on reservation lands. Mellis writes about the role of rodeo among three major tribes—Crows, Northern Cheyenne, and Lakota—that forcefully resisted the "Peace Policy" of President Ulysses S. Grant to confine Native Americans to designated reservation lands. Her book commences largely after the military battles had ended, but as the cultural battles over identity had begun. On reservations, the federal government intended to use policies such as allotment to promote individualism, farming, and a sedentary lifestyle for Native people who had lived nomadic lives on the plains. |
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