Book Review

Canada and the United States

This is the third of Loretta Fowler's implicitly comparative volumes on the political histories of northern Plains Indian tribes. Here she asks, "How did the specific historical experiences of the Cheyennes and Arapahos and their understandings of those experiences influence contemporary tribal politics, such as the electoral process in tribal government, the 1975 constitution, the implementation of Self-Determination Act legislation, and dance and powwow leadership institutions since the 1960s?" (p. xix). Among these historical experiences she includes not only alteration of political structures and limitations of self-governing power but also control of economic resources, social structures, religious rituals, and images that Native people held of themselves and that were held of them by others. Her understanding of past and present events is placed within the intermeshed context of all these factors.	1
The first half of the volume is historical, in which Fowler focuses forward to the second half that is ethnographic. The two parts are united in a brief final chapter of insightful discussion that deserves thorough, careful consideration.	2
The author's choice of subject, the Cheyenne-Arapahos of Oklahoma, is unusual and interesting in two significant ways. Displaced to "Indian Territory" like many other Plains tribes, their reservation was allotted and subsequently much of the land lost. Nevertheless, they remained a federally recognized tribe and formed a constitution under the Wheeler-Howard Act in 1937. Today they remain a formally organized tribe with very little land, surrounded by an extensive former reservation owned by others.	. . .