X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (review)

In X-Marks Scott Richard Lyons adds a timely and important optic to debates about contemporary Indian identity. Drawing from Ojibwe histories of migration, Lyons offers the x-mark as a metaphor for modern Indigenous identities formed in movement. Crystallized in the initial documents of modern contact—treaties—x-marks are Native assents to the new evidence of a commitment to the future welfare of a people contending with colonialism across varying and often contradictory times, spaces, and discourses. As Lyons poignantly articulates, x-marks are definitions of Indigenous identity that "would keep 'Indians' viable for at least seven generations, strengthen existing communities, enhance our political independence, and provide the greatest degree of happiness for the greatest number of Indians" (50).

As a distinctly historicist hermeneutic that privileges the diversity that an "identities in movement" definition implies, the x-mark categorically challenges the ahistoricism and biological essentialism that underwrite much of popular traditionalist discourses on identity, culture, nationalism, and citizenship. Each of the book's chapters is framed by the intersection of these four areas with traditionalism. In the first chapter Lyons begins with a brief review of Indian identity controversies over ethnic fraud, disenrollment, and banishment, arguing that these public spectacles reveal a larger crisis of identity whose uncertainty and contestability frame the possibilities of x-marks. Traditionalist academic studies like Eva Marie Garroutte's Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (2003) are critiqued in this section for offering correctives to this crisis that extend a view of blood essentialism. For Lyons, the crisis itself is not the problem; rather, the problem resides in essentialist misinterpretations of tradition like Garroutte's that prescribe identities rather than describe how they are formed and negotiated. Calling this a difference between "being" and "doing," Lyons makes a compelling case for descriptive understandings of tradition by analyzing Ojibwemowin (the Ojibwe language) equivalents to "doing," which describe identity according to certain behaviors, actions, and movements through time and space.

Although the author's treatment of Garroutte's ideas about kinship are, at times, a bit heavy-handed, he convincingly demonstrates how questions of being like "Who is an Indian?" foreclose the realities of x-mark identities that are constructed through movement and negotiation with colonial power structures. In the next chapter Lyons extends his critique of Garroutte in his discussion of traditionalist "culture cops" like Indigenous intellectuals and community elites who police the boundaries of being in order to maintain certain cultural forms of authenticity. This is epistemologically repugnant for Lyons, for another quick review of Ojibwemowin descriptions of culture similarly reveals a traditional proclivity for assenting to the new as a means to produce and sustain more, not less, life. Preoccupied with delimiting belonging according to the authenticist mantle of being, culture cops engage in a highly essentialist practice of "reactive self-perception" that ends up reinforcing the problematic philosophies of Otherness that colonial discourses of authenticity perform.¹

Throughout the remainder of the book Lyons depends on the paradigm of reactive self-perception to characterize traditionalists of all stripes. Perhaps not coincidentally, such a notion closely resembles Gerald Vizenor's wellknown trope of victimry. Indeed, many of Vizenor's ideas regarding identity, as well as literary critic Arnold Krupat's contested notion of Indigenous cosmopolitanism, directly frame Lyons's x-mark thesis. Although at times overcelebratory, Lyons's use of Vizenor is refreshing when one considers the strident and oftentimes incorrect critiques of Vizenor's work that have offset nationalist frameworks developed within American Indian studies over the last decade. In this regard, scholars of Indigenous nationalism can especially appreciate the incorporation of Vizenor's classic ideas about survivance into an interesting and original definition of Indigenous nationalism. In the book's third chapter Lyons critiques American Indian intellectual history—and the works of preeminent nationalist scholar Taiaiake Alfred in particular—to propose a vision of nationalism that embraces the new through "a modernization of the ethnie" (120). Distinct from Alfred's articulations of cultural...