Book Review

Euro-American observers of Plains Indians during the prereservation period often noted that the men within the various tribes had formed military societies. These voluntary, non-kin-based groups organized hunts, directed warfare, and served as tribal police. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropologists studied these societies—which were assumed to be disappearing on the reservation—and collected much descriptive data on the various groups. After the 1930s, interest in Plains Indian military societies waned, for most scholars considered that these sodalities had been adequately explained.

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The anthropologist William C. Meadows, however, contends that these studies neither addressed how the military societies actually functioned nor took into consideration their continued existence; he demonstrates that they have been maintained throughout the twentieth century. In this study, Meadows combines extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and analysis of symbols to reconstruct the history and significance of the military societies of the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche tribes of southwestern Oklahoma. More important, he shows how these groups adapted in the twentieth century to provide each tribe with its own distinctive identity while serving as tools for social integration and enculturation at the same time.

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