Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation (review)

In Indian communities around the country, local discourses and practices reveal a heady and contradictory blend of "American" and tribal ideas about nationhood, race, and political sovereignty. In Deadliest Enemies, anthropologist Thomas Biolsi explores such complexities and their interconnection with federal policy and law, developing insights in new and productive directions. Biolsi derives inspiration from an idea explicit not only in federal Indian law but also in everyday conversations throughout Indian country: that the "deadliest enemies" of Indian tribes are local non-Indians living within and adjacent to Indian reservations (1). Focusing on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, Biolsi asks how racial conflicts between Sicangu Lakota and local whites become naturalized as "primordial and perennial" (4). His central argument is that these tensions are not natural but instead are achieved through the workings of federal Indian law, which creates and recreates racial conflicts on an ongoing basis (6).

Drawing on the ideas of Michel Foucault, James Ferguson, Arturo Escobar, and Raymond Williams, Biolsi makes the case that legal discourses and practices have "real" effects that structure race relations in South Dakota in a political and economic sense. In the four body chapters following his brief historical introduction, Biolsi provides a thorough examination of numerous contradictions inherent in federal Indian law. These contradictions are revealed in what Biolsi describes as a fundamental antagonism between "uniqueness and uniformity" (14). On the one hand, Lakota people make many of their political and legal claims on the basis of treaty rights derived from their unique status as a sovereign nation (137). On the other hand, local non-Indians perceive those treaty rights as unconstitutional and "un-American," a threat to their basic rights as U.S. citizens. These conflicting rights-claims mirror the historical oscillation between assimilation and separatism that characterizes federal Indian policy, a movement tied to race-based claims and discourses that lay the foundation for ongoing, yet shifting, expressions of racial antagonism.

One of the most significant contributions of Biolsi's work is his probing analysis of jurisdictional conflict. Biolsi examines reservation boundary disputes, conflicts over the sale of liquor to Indians, and tribal business licenses to non-Indians, as well as conflicts about law enforcement on the state highway running through the reservation. In examining these and other related concerns, Biolsi demonstrates both how different definitions of "community" shape local, state, and federal interpretations of jurisdictional authority (91) and the degree to which claims of jurisdiction are fundamentally tied to ideas about sovereignty. He provides convincing evidence that both "community" and "sovereignty" are inherently limiting concepts for political struggle because of their hegemonic nature (190). Of even greater interest is his argument that matters of jurisdiction are more often than not decided on the basis of mere legal technicalities that serve to distract those involved from the more substantive issues at hand (185–7). For example, if the courts determine reservation boundaries based on their reading of congressional intent at the time of allotment, this act of interpretation, what Biolsi terms a "legal fiction," is shaped largely by the current social and political climate rather than by historical precedent (67–68).

Though racial tensions are found in communities throughout the United States, what is different about the situation in South Dakota and many other places in Indian country is that Indians and non-Indians are subjected to contradictory sets of legal doctrines and practices tied to conflicting race-based claims and are "made into enemies by forces not of their own choosing" (198). In fact, Biolsi goes so far as to state that "Indian law is a discourse that dominates, restructures, and has authority over Indian-white relations" (6). This argument, though useful, also reflects the limitations of a Focauldian approach that privileges discourse as a structuring force. What is lost is a grounded sense of human agency—of the people who struggle against and even...