In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History by Alexandra Harmon
  • Eve Darian-Smith (bio)
Alexandra Harmon. Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3423-7388pp.

This deeply historical, engaging, and elegantly written book makes a significant contribution to what is largely a forgotten narrative about Native Americans in US history. Providing a counterbalance to the widely held assumption that all Indigenous peoples are victims of oppression and exploitation and as a result are massively impoverished, the author showcases moments over the past four hundred years when a few Native American individuals and communities have actually been wealthy. These stories of Native good fortune are extraordinarily interesting in their own right, and I discuss a few below. As the author argues, “precisely because stories of wealthy Indians deviate from the familiar chronicle of economic decline they deserve to be told. . . . [End Page 110] As presumed rarities or anomalies, prosperous Indians have defied the expectations of contemporaries and historians. Their stories, including the reactions they provoked, should afford new insights about Indians and non-Indians who dealt with them” (9).

Stories of native prosperity, however, do not provide a happy counternarrative to tales of pervasive poverty as is typically presented in analyzing the history of Native American peoples. As Alexandra Harmon shows throughout the book, these combined stories ultimately affirm biases and racial prejudices of the dominant white settler society toward Native peoples. In other words, these historically anomalous stories of Indigenous wealth disrupted dominant stereotypes about Native peoples as “poor,” “worthless,” and “irrelevant.” But, argues the author, how these moments were interpreted and dealt with ultimately confirmed many of these negative stereotypes rather than dislodging them. The end result is a long historical pattern of Euro-Americans discounting Native wealth and entrepreneurship in an effort to reassert their dominance over a marginalized minority. What this historical pattern suggests with respect to mainstream responses to the newly gained wealth by some Native Americans operating casinos and other commercial interests in the twenty-first century is immensely provocative and profoundly disturbing.

Why is wealth a “problem” when held by Indians but not when held by non-Indians? This is the central question that the author explores against a historical backdrop of American colonial settlement, capitalist development, frontier expansion, and efforts toward ethnic assimilation that constituted the burgeoning nationalist landscape of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Harmon argues that what constitutes “wealth” is not a fixed concept and shifts over time. How wealth was interpreted by Indian and non-Indian populations at particular moments and the degree to which it was considered a “problem” reflected different cultural values and social relations. Hence people’s reaction to wealth provides a site through which Indian and non-Indian understandings of themselves and each other can be read. Or, to use the language of the author, the “moral ideology” surrounding Native wealth presents a window onto broader themes involving how whites imagined Native peoples should act, think, and socially relate and the degree to which they should be allowed to participate in mainstream society. In short, the constitution of Indian identity, as much as [End Page 111] the constitution of non-Indian identity, was and is at stake in discussions about Native prosperity.

How Indians accumulated wealth, if they “deserved’ to be prosperous, whether Indians shared their wealth with other Indians, the appropriateness of Indians holding individual property rights, and so on informed white Americans’ “moral judgments” of Indian economic behavior that in turn “merged with ideas about Indians” (3). Importantly, the tone and ramifications of this moral judgment shifted over time. According to the author’s discussion in chapter 2, in the early colonial era the presence of entrepreneurial Natives was not seen by whites as extraordinarily wrong or inappropriate. Colonists described individual men and women of Indigenous descent such as Coosaponakeesa, Molly Brant, and Alexander McGillivray as regal, civilized, and versed in the practices of gentility. While these colorful figures of early colonialism walked a tightrope between being accepted by both tribal communities and British colonial society, their open identification...

pdf