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Reviews
| Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. xx + 364 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).
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In February 2007 the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe won its decades-long struggle for federal recognition, finally overcoming the long argument that its history of intermarriage made the community "black" but not "Indian." Just three weeks later, members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma voted in a special election to amend its tribal constitution to take away the Cherokee Nation citizenship of about 2,800 black "Freedmen," descendents of former Cherokee slaves. Both cases demonstrate how powerfully the notion of race—and especially blackness—matters in Indian Country. Into these troubled terrains of memory, belonging, collectivity, and understanding comes the remarkably timely and uniquely evocative Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, edited by the historian Tiya Miles and the literary scholar Sharon Holland, both authors of prize-winning books in their respective fields. Holland and Miles have assembled a bravely explorative collection of essays that traverses genres, disciplines, national borders, and continental divides, broaching the difficult dimensions of love, loss, disappointment, denial, estrangement, sacrifice, and exclusion that have characterized lateral relations between and among these peoples of color in the colonized Americas. |
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Whereas previous essay collections on Native-black interrelationship such as James Brooks's Confounding the Color Line: The Indian Black Experience in North America (Lincoln, NE, 2002) have concentrated on historiography, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds takes a cultural studies approach, combining social, literary, and intellectual history with legal commentary, ethnography, personal essays, interviews, and short fiction. The result is a volume that uniquely captures the profound depths of feeling entailed in black-Indian identities and relationships. In his afterword, Robert Warrior charges readers to take from Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds a model of "how to treat Afro-Native studies with the existential depth and anguish it deserves" (p. 323). |
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Shared losses, shared hopes, and other fascinating intersections are the subject of many essays in this volume. African American poet Eugene B. Redmond interviews Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo; together, they remember musical forms of "camaraderie" as well as "fearfulness" between black and Native communities. Jennifer Brody and Sharon Holland sift through the self-productions of the nineteenth-century Afro-Native memoirist Elleanor Eldridge, whose story marks the limits of literature in recuperating loss. David A. Y. O. Chang offers a fascinating account of emigration movements in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Creek Nation: traditionalist factions of the tribe considered relocation to Mexico, while some black freedpeople supported and even participated in West African emigration efforts. |
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Several essays highlight the difficult, often divisive negotiations of African and Afro-Native political status within indigenous communities. Choctaw and Chickasaw freedpeople are the subject of Barbara Krauthamer's study of Reconstruction-era black-Indian citizenship; in the wake of 1866 treaty negotiations between the tribes and the federal government, Krauthamer finds that black freedpeople in these communities "lived from day to day without the protections and benefits of citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States" (p. 108). In her study of Seminole Nation perspectives on Seminole freedpeople's political status, Melinda Micco suggests that racial disagreements within the nation have been influenced and unhelpfully complicated by outsider federal, state, and local contexts. Celia Naylor looks into the controversy surrounding the selection of Radmilla Cody as Miss Navajo Nation in 1997–98, examining debates among Navajos about the relationship between phenotype, linguistic and cultural proficiency, and identity. In his thoughtful ethnographic study of Chatalusa Black Choctaws, Robert Collins demonstrates how community elders assert their "right to be recognized in accordance with how they see themselves" (p. 272). Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds marks a new crossroads in ethnic history and ethnic studies scholarship: a mode of scholarly interaction between Native and black worlds that refuses to sacrifice the feelings at the heart of their tangled histories.
Joanna Brooks
San Diego State University
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