| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process. By Mark Edwin Miller. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. xii, 355 pp. $59.95, ISBN 0-8032-3226-8.)

For most of the history of the federal-Indian relationship, "recognition" of tribes was on a basis similar to the standard for pornography; while lacking a definition, the government knew a tribe when it saw one. It was not until the 1930s and the Indian Reorganization Act that formal federal guidelines were drawn up to sort out which groups were eligible to form governments under the act. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) became and remains the arbiter of tribehood, although some groups have achieved the status through congressional legislation. In the 1970s under the pressure of a congressional inquiry and a number of land claim cases in eastern states, a permanent formal procedure to consider and process outstanding claims for federal Indian tribal status was created by the BIA—the Federal Acknowledgment Process (FAP), managed by the Branch of Acknowledgment and Research. The new mill ground slowly; from 1978 to 2000 over 200 petitions were made with only 34 resolved, 15 tribes recognized and 19 not (p. 54).

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