Book Review

Under a stern title (The tribes must disappear), Daniele Fiorentino characterizes a little-visited period of white-Indian relations, the Progressive Era. During that period the major instrument of governmental policy continued to be the Dawes Act of 1887, a law enacted to redistribute reservation land to Indians in individual parcels and thus to replace tribal culture with that of mainstream America. Instead, it transferred large amounts of land to white ownership, one of the many unintended consequences that the text explores. Fiorentino brings the early-twentieth-century bureaucracy of Indian administration to life, primarily through sketches of government functionaries, at least some of whom were determined to make a difference in a sector where a great deal of difference needed to be made. But as he amply demonstrates, the aspirations of the Progressives were ill suited to the reality of the Indians. Although the new science of anthropology embraced cultural difference and human equality, Fiorentino observes that in the first years of the century, there could be only one model of survival--the assimilation of 'inferior' peoples, European immigrants and racial others alike, into the dominant culture, known as 'civilization.'

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