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Book Review
| Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Brian Hosmer and Colleen O'Neill. Foreword by Donald L. Fixico. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004. xii + 354 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. $26.95, paper.)
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In recent years, growing numbers of scholars of American Indian history and culture have written about creative indigenous adaptations to economic, cultural, and political change. Still, too often, scholars portray capitalism and Indian culture in dichotomous terms, depicting the former solely as a threat to the latter. Native Pathways challenges this persistent dichotomy with an insightful series of essays on how Indians engaged capitalism in the twentieth century. In her superb introduction, Colleen O'Neill urges scholars to locate "alternative pathways to economic and cultural change that were not merely static renditions of some timeless past, or total acceptance of U. S. capitalist culture" (p. 3). Native communities, she argues, have long embraced certain capitalist forms while simultaneously "contesting the terms of modernity itself" (p. 12). |
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Native Pathways is divided into three parts: "Commerce and Incorporation," "Wage Work," and "Methodology and Theoretical Implications." Among the highlights of Part I is Jessica Cattalino's "Casino Roots," which examines Seminole commercial cattle ranching and craft production, alligator wrestling, and cigarette sales—all of which existed long before contemporary Seminole casinos. Alligator wrestling, beginning in the 1920s, allowed Seminole men both to earn income and express their "masculine bravery" and their cultural connection to the Everglades (p. 80). Unlike alligator wrestling, the Seminoles have not yet accepted recent gaming operations as "traditional," but instead have compartmentalized them as economic necessities. Still, most Seminoles view the political struggle over gaming as symbolic of their broader struggle for sovereignty. Cattalino thus rightly rejects a simplistic notion that casinos evince a withering of Seminole identity. |
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In Part II, David Arnold's "Work and Culture in Southeastern Alaska" is among the most nuanced contributions. Arnold explores Tlingit adaptations to Alaska's commercial salmon industry beginning in the nineteenth century. After the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, commercial fishing eroded old political hierarchies, since clan leaders could no longer monopolize the distribution of wealth. Still, the clan system survived in altered form, and new tribal institutions arose to protect tribal sovereignty in the 1930s. Tlingits also modified their traditional gendered division of labor rather than abandon it, so that men continued to fish while women processed the catch for wages. |
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In Part III, Brian Hosmer's "Dollar a Day and Glad to Have It" urges historians to incorporate oral histories into their work, but with a critical eye. He demonstrates that oral sources do not simply tell us what people did; rather, they tell us how people remember their experiences. In two dozen interviews he conducted in 2000–2001 about the New Deal work relief programs of the Wind River Reservation, married men, single men, and women remembered the work camps differently. While women tended to depict the camps as communities of families, single men tended to discuss them merely as places to eat and sleep, and married men spoke mostly about their work activities, but also recalled recreational activities in the camps more than did single men. When viewed collectively, these oral histories provide insights into, among other things, the gendered nature of experience and memory. |
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Some of the chapters are less nuanced in their analyses of Indian adaptations to economic change. Articles by Paul Rosier and Duane Chapagne, while often insightful, uncritically recycle the essentialist terms "mixed bloods" and "full bloods," without questioning the implied link between culture and genetics. Such passages contradict one of the goals of the volume: to challenge the notion of dichotomous responses to economic and cultural change. Still, overall, Native Pathways is a strong anthology that will interest ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and others who are intrigued by the relationship between culture and capitalism in the twentieth century. |
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| Eric V. Meeks
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| Northern Arizona University |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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