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Book Review
| Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf, and the Creation of Nez Perce History in the Pacific Northwest. By Robert R. McCoy. (New York: Routledge, 2004. xvii + 247 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $85.00.)
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Scholars familiar with Northwest history will quickly recognize most of the events and people discussed in Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf, and the Creation of Nez Perce History in the Pacific Northwest. Not only Joseph and Yellow Wolf, but Marcus Whitman, Twisted Hair, O. O. Howard, Sue and Kate McBeth, Lewis and Clark, Lawyer, Edmund Meany, and many other familiar characters populate the pages of this book. All played various roles in Nez Perce history; only a few of them came to dominate the narrative. |
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Author Robert McCoy deliberately reframes his account of Northwest and Nez Perce history to expose how and why Nez Perce people were, until the twentieth century, silenced in the telling of history. Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf adopts a metaphor from the Nez Perce creation story in which a great Monster began to consume the entire world until defeated by Coyote. In freeing the world from Monster, Coyote created the earth and people. Similarly, McCoy suggests, the construction of history through only non-Native perspectives symbolically consumed the Nez Perces, who were freed by the publication of Yellow Wolf's account of the Nez Perce War some sixty years after its end. His narrative overcame a seemingly insatiable creature that served only its own purposes. Coyote (Yellow Wolf's account) thus slew the monster (Anglo-American policies and racism) a second time. The long process of rethinking and rewriting Northwest history began. |
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Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf articulates the very problem contemporary scholars have identified in Native history: a dearth of Native voices shaping and contributing to the narrative. Yellow Wolf's story, while remarkable in its own right, becomes all the more valuable as a historiographical advance. Thus, while McCoy's book retells an oft-told story, its main contribution lies in directly and fully confronting Anglo dominance in the shaping of history. Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf analyzes an American consciousness—or lack of—regarding perspectives. It is not, to be sure, a retelling of the story from a Native perspective. |
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Numerous sources rendered Nez Perce people invisible in the construction and telling of history. From newspapers to textbooks, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writings frequently assumed the propriety of Anglo-American domination and land ownership even while some of them recognized the injustices done to the Nez Perce people. McCoy effectively identifies ethnocentric missionaries, government officials, and writers, all of whom hold responsibilities for historical misrepresentations and omissions. Cultural misunderstandings and simple communication errors compounded the problem. |
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The text of this book is marred somewhat by misspellings and factual errors. Missionary Sue McBeth, for instance, was well established in Idaho by the time of the Nez Perce War of 1877; in multiple places, the book reports her arrival date as 1879. Similar other minor but important points pepper Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf. Nonetheless, readers will gain from it. While much of the topical coverage is not new or surprising to scholars of Northwest or Native American history, because of its historiographical emphasis, it makes a fine introduction to both of those fields. |
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| Elizabeth James
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| University of Alaska Anchorage |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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