Book Review

To Be the Main Leaders of Our People is political history, written from an indigenous perspective. It shows how the shifting alliances of civil and war chiefs allowed the nineteenth-century Ojibwe to retain their autonomy and to revitalize impoverished and demoralized villages.	1
This book refutes standard scenarios that have linked internal village divisions, particularly the inability to construct a united oppositional front, to land loss and decline. Professor Rebecca Kugel ventures beyond traditional social dichotomies that view nineteenth-century Indians as either militant traditionalists or peaceful accommodationists. Kugel reveals a more complex contest, one that appeared to pit civil and war chiefs against each other. She demonstrates that this was a division long associated with village governance, not a response to American arrival. It was this presence of both civil and war chiefs that fostered successful oppositional strategies. Without an opposition willing to take up arms, the more accommodating force of the civil chiefs lacked authority.	. . .