Book Review

Canada and the United States

United States historians have long understood the important position Native Americans played in shaping the nation's identity and culture. Indians' priority and presence on the continent, their resistance to European and Anglo-American dispossession, and their cultural persistence well after conquest have mattered a great deal, not only effecting policies but influencing Americans' sense of themselves. Roy Harvey Pearce, Bernard Sheehan, and Robert Berkhofer were among the first to explore the implications of Indian-white relations for American cultural and intellectual history. In recent years, a new generation of scholars has revisited this theme, not to dispute or challenge earlier interpretations but to extend the analysis and bring fresh perspectives. Eliza McFeely's elegantly written book joins that literature. The book offers no startling new point of view but rather a carefully crafted look at how this theme played out at New Mexico's Zuni Pueblo when a handful of anthropologists arrived at the turn of the twentieth century determined to understand and intellectually "possess" that community. McFeely concludes that, while their works provide insights into the Zuni culture at the time, they reveal a great deal more about the anthropologists' world.

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