Notes from a Miner's Canary: Essays on the State of Native America (review)

Reading this collection is not without considerable rewards. Jace Weaver is admirably hemispheric and global in his intellectual reach. His essays often provide an effective synthesis of topics related to Native America. The breadth of the book is one of its pleasures. The essay reviewing contemporary Native architecture takes up a topic that receives little attention and deserves more. "A Lantern to See By" effectively combines Weaver's attachment to Oklahoma with a hard-hitting thesis on Lynn Riggs's implied critique of allotment, land theft, and Oklahomans' character. Pilgrimages on the Quechan Trails, debates over the Ancestral Puebloans, Native eschatology, and changing Native attitudes toward archeology are just some of the other engaging topics covered.

With touching and thoughtful personal reflection, such as the concluding piece on the Cherokee removal, his associational method of organization is like a stimulating conversation. For most essays, however, clearer organization and argument would be useful. The book's title, part of the problem of cohesion, misdirects the reader. Taken from one of the essays already published in a previous Weaver book, the title references Felix Cohen's famous comparison of Native peoples in the United States to a canary in the mine. Yet the book does not read as a warning to the larger culture. The subtitle also raises unfulfilled expectations. While some essays assess the state of Native America, many focus on present scholarship of ancient peoples or other topics. Even the essay "The Current State of Native American Studies" is more a desultory excursion touching on significant topics than a critical evaluation. One essay on US military tribunals takes up one fourth of the book but has no specific bearing on Native America. A wide range of interesting details fascinate Weaver, and so the essays have many digressions. Chapter 3, for example, takes six pages to get to its point. It develops the topics of environmentalism, white guilt, and "Indians as Icons" by repeating much from the previous chapter. Since the essays generally cover a range of topics, which often come up in more than one essay, the index may be a more useful tool than the table of contents.

In chapter 1, Weaver calls for interdisciplinary work and then puts this methodology into practice. In doing so, he exemplifies its strengths and some of its challenges. The interdisciplinary essays tend to summarize others' research without developing new arguments or insights. Opinions are stated but often without support. Even if the individual articles are more like notes than essays, the collection does offer the reader much to learn from this significant leader in Native American studies.