| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Paige Raibmon. Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. (A John Hope Franklin Center Book.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 307. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

In the summer of 1999 the international media streamed images of Makah hunters, Aboriginal peoples of the northwest tip of the lower forty-eight states, as they attempted to harpoon a Grey whale and then finish the kill with a gun. Outraged citizens of both the United States and Canada vented their contempt for the Makah in newspapers and on radio, focusing on the inauthenticity of their use of guns and motorboats. The 1855 treaty, which reserved Makah rights to whale hunting, was dismissed as insignificant in relation to the demands of moving into the twentieth century. This episode is the opening salvo in Paige Raibmon's fascinating account of the use of the idea of authenticity in the colonial domination of Aboriginal peoples in the American Pacific Northwest. Raibmon shows why the response in 1999 is but a recent manifestation in the history of white imaginations of the authentic Indian in ways that limit claims to resources, land, and sovereignty. Raibmon's project is not so much a documentation of public policy or legal decisions, although these are considered, but the examination of the creation of a hegemonic view within which the general public, legislators, and jurors worked. Aboriginal peoples themselves, she demonstrates, trapped within a structure of power, collaborated unequally in the creation of a notion of authenticity, a powerful yet unstable yardstick. She clarifies that by authenticity she means colonially defined notions, not "purity or timeless tradition" (p. 212, n. 13).

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