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Reviewed by:
  • Forgotten Voices: Death Records of the Yakama, 1888-1964
  • Michelle M. Jacob (bio)
Forgotten Voices: Death Records of the Yakama, 1888-1964. by Clifford E. Trafzer and Robert R. McCoy . Scarecrow Press, 2009

Clifford Trafzer and Robert McCoy's Forgotten Voices: Death Records of the Yakama, 1888-1964, builds directly upon Trafzer's book published twelve years earlier in 1997, Death Stalks the Yakama: Epidemiological Transitions and Mortality on the Yakama Indian Reservation, 1888-1964. There are striking similarities between the two texts, as they both discuss the main causes of death facing Yakama peoples in the same historical period and utilize the same data set. However, Forgotten Voices makes two main contributions that build upon Trafzer's earlier monograph: the publishing of the Yakama death record data set and a more developed and critical discussion of genocide. I will discuss these two contributions in turn.

Upon first glance, one notices that the heart of the book is mostly a hard copy of a data set of Yakama death records (56-163). It looks and reads like a huge spreadsheet. The authors view the dissemination of the data set as a way to share information and to encourage scholars to use the data and build their own data sets of death records. As they mention in the preface, "The work offers nearly all of the statistics dealing with mortality of Yakama people from 1888 to 1964, and we encourage scholars, buffs, and members of the Indian communities of the Northwest to use our data. We hope that our work will encourage others to expand the Yakama story and compare these statistics with future data sets created by others" (xiv). I agree that this approach is novel. Rarely do scholars so openly share their data sets, and Trafzer and McCoy should be applauded for moving in this direction. However, I was hoping for an additional resource and note that the authors could have increased access by providing a link to a website with an electronic copy of the data set.

The second main contribution that distinguishes Forgotten Voices from Death Stalks the Yakama is the way in which Trafzer and McCoy have sharpened their analysis to examine critically the United Nations' definition of genocide and how it applies to their study's findings (xv). The authors state, "We believe that the statistical documentation found in this work supports the thesis that the government of the United States committed genocide against the people of the Yakama Nation" (46). Genocide, as a term, is not found in Trafzer's earlier monograph, but it is central to the conclusions that Trafzer and McCoy put forth in Forgotten Voices. I view this as the greatest contribution of the book. Few [End Page 97] authors of statistical studies have the courage to link their findings to the genocide of Native peoples.

The main contents of the book include a lengthy introduction (1-52), in which the authors provide their main analytical contributions, and they include a detailed methodological discussion (27-44). After the introduction, the book is divided into brief sections, by diseases, and each section includes the variables for all people who died from a particular disease. These sections are listed in the table of contents, for ease of use, so that if a reader would like to see the data for people who died from whooping cough, for example, they would know to turn to page 137. Each major disease has a brief discussion (usually a page or two) that helps readers understand the importance of the disease and some of the related social and cultural context. These short discussions are summaries of the analyses provided earlier in the book's introduction.

Trafzer has a respectful tradition of dedicating his work to the Native peoples who are the focus of his study. He has a long history of working with Yakama peoples and the issues that we face. However, I feel that Trafzer and McCoy could have pushed their analysis in Forgotten Voices a bit further. My critique here stems from my understanding that critical Native American studies scholarship needs to provide analyses that can be directly applied and are useful to...

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