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Book Review
| David J. Carlson, Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. 217. $30 (ISBN 0-252-07266-9).
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| The close of 2006 saw headlines about Native Americans in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The Journal reported that the demand for eagle feathers was on the rise because of increased powwow attendance; the New York Times reported on the impact of usurious loans on a Navajo debtor. The Journal article was replete with indians; the Times story with Indians. |
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The indian (little i) is a mythological icon of liberalism. In law, even first year law students study what Carlson calls the "historical myths of contractarianism" (88) embedded as they are in Chief Justice John Marshall's Johnson v. McIntosh opinion. In Johnson, Marshall uses the indian to represent a corporate (group) identity, a cautionary marker: for Marshall, indians (little i) live together in nature, hunting, warring and/or cooperating in ways that fall short of the individualism required by the private property system. The ethnographic Indian (the capital I Native person), on the other hand, is a politically subjective being descended from the indigenous people(s) of North (and/or South) America, a member of an indigenous community in culture, identity, history, race, and perhaps politics. |
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Carlson's book is a study of the autobiographical texts of Indian writers (Apess, Eastman, Occom, Parker, and Winnemucca) as read against U.S. Indian law. The book raises two points of theoretical importance to legal scholars. The first—mentioned by Carlson, but not developed—is that there is a communicative circuit between Indian identity and the law. The second is that imagining an Indian self within the confines of the indian stereotype presented theoretical difficulties for the writers whose texts Carlson analyzes. |
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Carlson explains that in order to reach the (white) public, Indian writers strove for accessibility. Non-Indians then, as now, were ignorant of the politically subjective Indian, but they were familiar with the indian as symbol. Transport Vizenor's (174–75), Momaday's (174–75), or Scholder's late twentieth-century work back to the nineteenth or early twentieth century as a thought experiment and it is apparent that their works would have been misunderstood or (more likely) ignored precisely because they do not incorporate the stereotyped indian imaginary. Carlson argues that nineteenth-century Indian autobiographers incorporated the indian into their own Indian life stories for the sake of being read. This kind of self-abnegation led to thick moral tension for writers who represented themselves as part of a corporate indian world even as they engaged in the radically individuating act of autobiography. Thus Carlson elaborates on how these texts, read against U.S. Indian law, are a rich source of material for scholars who study law and identity. |
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While Carlson's argument is well made, the book has identifiable weaknesses. On the law side, Carlson's grasp of U.S. Indian law is overbroad and too dependent on Robert A. Williams's Linking Arms Together (1999) frame. On the historical side, even though Carlson examines primary texts, he overlooks secondary works that might provide useful context. Carlson is at his best when discussing Apess and Mashpee, but there too he relies almost entirely on James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture 277 (1988), which, though excellent, has inspired almost twenty years of subsequent scholarship on the topic of law and identity in general and courtroom cultural performances in particular. |
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Additionally, had Carlson dipped into the law and society literature, he might have been intrigued to learn that the idea of communicative circuits is hotly debated. Even a quick look at a classic like A History of American Law, by Lawrence M. Friedman, would have enhanced Carlson's useful thoughts on "institutions of self" (65). The Indian autobiographers Carlson writes about were political beings who were indeed aware of law's power over Native peoples. Even so, Carlson's argument rests on the tenuous assumption that the autobiographers were writing against law as found in high-church legal documents. Isn't it as plausible that Apess, to take one example, was writing not against the inaccessible, Mandarin, high-church texts of law so much as against plays, sermons, lectures, and other accessible popular sources that represented law (however distortedly) for public consumption? |
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Carlson's main distinction is between being Indian and writing about being indian. In the nineteenth century, being Indian meant opting out of a communicative circuit shared with white Americans. It meant living on one's own terms, according to one's Native imaginaries. Certainly there were Indian writers or orators who opted out of the white American view of things. If so, Carlson does not engage their records or otherwise mention a trajectory of separatism in Native communities. Writing about being Indian, on the other hand—at least until the late twentieth-century when the works of Momaday, Vizenor, and (I would add) Silko are published—was to opt into a shared communicative circuit cast by racism, colonialism, and power. This circuit recorded the white American side of things at the expense of the Indian side. Over time that circuit gave rise to the indian: a stereotypic, invented, symbolic, iconic, problematic imaginary against which European Americans came to understand themselves as Americans of European descent rather than as Europeans in America. |
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| Jo Carrillo
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| University of California |
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