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Book Review
| The Shoshone-Bannocks: Culture and Commerce at Fort Hall, 1870–1940. By John W. Heaton. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. x, 340 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-7006-1402-8.)The Struggle for Self-Determination: History of the Menominee Indians since 1854. By David R. M. Beck. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xviii, 290 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8032-1347-6.)
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| Nineteenth-century Indian reservations were meant to be machines for assimilation. They were to be transitory places where, under the direction of federal agents, tribes would dissolve, leaving behind individual Indians ready to disappear into modern America. Native peoples, however, turned these temporary institutions into permanent homelands, adapting tribal cultures to new conditions. Historians have lately begun to pay greater attention to reservation communities, and both books under review make substantial contributions to this important literature. |
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John W. Heaton meticulously examined the Shoshone-Bannocks of Idaho's Fort Hall reservation, focusing on their interaction with the market economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before the reservation, they were hunters and gatherers with an economy dependent on the ability of small kin groups to respond efficiently to changing resources. That flexibility, Heaton suggested, served the Shoshone-Bannocks well at Fort Hall where they merged traditions of communal subsistence with market-oriented practices. Some families, for example, cut hay in Fort Hall's river bottoms, selling it to non-Indian ranchers. Echoing pre-reservation practices, kin groups maintained seasonal rights to cut in particular places. They would camp in these locations during the harvest and then move elsewhere to hunt, fish, and gather wild plants—an arrangement that was not terribly different from the seasonal migrations of earlier times. Heaton noted similar patterns among small-scale farmers who cultivated land but also traveled, sometimes beyond reservation borders, to make use of traditional resources. By integrating new economic practices into older ways of life, Heaton suggested, Shoshone-Bannocks were able to gain some of the benefits of the market economy while maintaining communities capable of fending off assimilation-minded agents. Fort Hall residents, in fact, developed a reputation in the Indian bureau for both economic success and resistance to assimilation. |
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