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Reviews
| New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations. Edited by Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Illustrations, photos, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).
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This reviewer, who is far from a lone voice in the wilderness, has long argued that Native American Studies is more than any random study of North American indigenes. At minimum it requires a multidisciplinary approach that seeks to understand Native reality from an indigenous perspective. It was therefore with great anticipation that I picked up this volume, whose jacket copy promised that "the essays employ a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches" and whose Introduction states that in the anthologized essays the authors "exemplify the broad interests and interdisciplinary approach of their mentor" (p. xi). Judging the volume based on these enticing statements, the book was a disappointment. Rather than the thoroughgoing interdisciplinarity that was expected, the volume was divided, as the subtitle suggests, among anthropological and historical studies and "representation" work (which, by its nature, does not seek an internal vision but rather usually seeks to understand the outward-directed gaze toward the Other). |
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Though I will doubtless not be alone in my disappointment, such a stance is ultimately unfair. Hyperbole aside, one should approach and judge this work on its own terms. What one has here is a work of ethnohistory, which uses the methodologies of anthropology and history as its twin lens to study Natives. New Perspectives is a Festschrift to Raymond Fogelson, one of the leading anthropologists of Native America during the second half of the twentieth century, and the collection of essays that compose the volume began life in two double sessions at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1996. As with other such projects, the contributors are colleagues and former students of Dr. Fogelson's (broadly construed). |
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And it is an impressive list of contributors, with very senior figures, such as Raymond DeMallie, Peter Nabokov, and coeditor Kan, placed alongside younger, less established scholars. Overall, the individual pieces are strong. Thomas Buckley, who has done very good long-term work among the Yurok, continues here with a piece on Native authorship of ethnography in northwestern California. Margaret Bender expands upon Fogelson's own work with the Eastern Cherokee. Perhaps the strongest essay is historian Jean O'Brien's "'Vanishing' Indians in Nineteenth-Century New England: Local Historians' Erasure of Still-Present Indian Peoples." This historiographic work smartly discusses non-Natives' writings contrapuntally with those of William Apess and Charles Eastman to move beyond a simple discussion of white narratives of vanishing. |
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As interesting and valuable as the individual pieces are, the volume is not flawless. (What edited volume is?) It would be desirable to have Native scholars besides O'Brien. And I found myself wanting a response from Fogelson to what is, in the end, a very loving tribute.
Jace Weaver
University of Georgia
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