Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (review)

Silverman delivers a well-researched, comprehensive study of the Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians. He takes a complex story that has previously been told in only a limited way and makes it accessible not to just formally trained historians but also to others wanting a more complete picture of indigenous attempts at survival. Filling in some of the many blanks between first contact and twenty-first century America, he explains why American Indians and tribes exist today despite colonization, disease, warfare, and other means of removing them from the landscape, which sometimes included literal removal from the east to the west.

Silverman examines the Brothertown and the Stockbridge through the lens of race to demonstrate how Indians were often able to maintain their identity after adopting their conqueror’s religion, dress, mannerism, and language, despite the realization that their differences from the colonizers were not superficial. His terminology works to describe the feeling of a deep—almost biological—distinction that explains the ongoing inequalities experienced by Indian people (9). Even though the Brothertown and the Stockbridge, adopted many of the superficial characteristics of the “white” population, equal treatment was not forthcoming because they were still Indians. They continued to exist on the periphery. The indisputable message sent to them was that being “civilized” was not a matter of religion, dress, or language but of skin color.

When the Brothertown and Stockbridge became U.S. citizens by separate acts of Congress, ninety years before Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, they were supposed to acquire the complete set of legal rights and duties that this status bestowed. Silverman explains, however, that from the very beginning, such privileges were destined to evade them, just as they would evade freed slaves nearly three decades later. The act of 1839, which gave the Brothertown citizenship and an allotment of reservation land, protected them from the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which might have authorized their removal to Kansas (they had just moved voluntarily from New York to Wisconsin; ironically, some of the Brothertown and Stockbridge later chose to live in Kansas). It did not, however, win them the other rights and privileges, such as the vote, that citizenship routinely accorded to whites. Their ongoing struggles to obtain them served only to reinforce the idea of racial discrimination (196, 207–208).

As Silverman explains, the Stockbridge did not all agree that U.S. citizenship would be their savior (201–206). This debate within the tribe continues to reverberate throughout Indian Country into the twenty-first century, raising questions about the true source of tribal sovereignty. Issues raised by many of the Stockbridge more than 150 years ago were not dispelled by either passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 or the passage of time.

Silverman’s chronological account of Brothertown and Stockbridge citizenship concludes with the most recent chapter in Brothertown history. The federal government stopped acknowledging the Brothertown Indian Nation in the early 1980s (215). After nearly thirty years in the administrative federal acknowledgment process, the Brothertown received a negative proposed finding of federal acknowledgment in 2009. Although this decision can be appealed, the basis of the proposed finding all but prevents the possibility of a final determination that differs in any substantive way. The Office of Federal Acknowledgment (ofa) interpreted the congressional legislation that conferred citizenship on the Brothertown in 1839 as an act of termination that it was powerless to overrule. Under federal law, only Congress can undo an act of Congress.

Silverman points out that “American society has found it easier to ignore the Brothertowns, not because the Brothertowns have ever ceased to exist but because they confound popular assumption about what it means to be Indian” (214). The epilogue of his book therefore brings his story full circle. Initially thinking citizenship would equate with acceptance and survival, the Brothertown were eventually to learn otherwise. At...