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  • The Northern Cheyenne Exodus In History and Memory by James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers
  • Jessica Taylor
The Northern Cheyenne Exodus In History and Memory. By James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. 276 pp. Paperback, $19.95.

The North Cheyenne Exodus drops the reader in the Northern Plains circa 1878, in a world made meaningful by the Cheyenne but fundamentally altered by American military outposts and European American immigrant families. A faction of the Northern Cheyenne, led by men such as Wild Hog, Dull Knife, and Little Wolf, traveled across that world from Oklahoma Indian Territory to Montana, driven by memories of home. Their escape from submission to the US Army came at the price of Cheyenne, settler, and soldier lives, and the memory and myth of carnage are at the center of this book. James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers carry us through the cosmologies of Cheyenne homeland and Manifest Destiny that planted seeds of conflict, but then they explore the memory of massacres in nineteenth-century national politics and twentieth-century nostalgia, entertainment, and reconciliation. They conclude convincingly that cultural memories of the Cheyenne exodus will continue to evolve, “for it is through the process of remembering that cultures define themselves and their relations with others” (203).

Oral historians are accustomed to hearing about how dueling narratives—oftentimes subaltern and colonial narratives—clash in a battle for meaning-making. Inspired by Maurice Halbwachs (On Collective Memory [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992]), Leiker and Powers reconstruct collective memories that are regenerative instead of stagnant, “not one story but several,” not oppositional but interactive (203). Refreshingly, the authors emphasize that the Cheyenne held diverse, even “fragmented,” political points of view and hopes for their futures, and as their memories changed so did their identities (203). For example, in 1879, Wild Hog quieted the American public’s call to put Cheyenne raiders on trial and instead refocused attention on deplorable conditions in American military barracks, emphasizing the suffering and victimhood of his people. At the same time, white American preoccupation with rugged masculinity in the wake of postbellum industrialization produced fictionalized accounts and novels remembering the West and Native Americans with nostalgia [End Page 188] instead of fear. Both trends lent a hand to the ultimate acquittal of the Cheyenne warriors despite calls for blood from the settlers on the Plains. This dialectic, in which Cheyenne and white leaders took turns influencing and capitalizing upon cultural memories proves mutuality; in the authors’ words, “‘playing Indian’ and ‘playing pioneer’ do not oppose each other and in fact are part of the same discourse” (181).

Their powerful claim here complicates traditional narratives of Indian victimization at the hands of white settlers moving west: Indians, like whites, committed violence. There is more than one Indian perspective, and more than one white (and nonwhite American!) perspective. And the line of civilization that moves from east to west is a happy and tidy imperial myth. But in this spirit, the authors register as biased accounts that support Indian rights while not mentioning the killing of settlers; the authors’ treatment of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 book A Century of Dishonor is a prime example. The results of this logic might be dangerous. Omission is not bias if the argument is unrelated to the omitted information; in this case, Native American groups deserve rights and sovereignty regardless of acts of war or violence. It is not a chain of thought we would follow in the case of settlers and their rights. I also worry about larger, discursive biases present in the sources: after Dull Knife and Little Wolf fall silent, the Cheyenne play a less prominent role in memory-making and oftentimes speak through white venues, from Senate reports to television interviews. The discussion of tribal histories led by native leaders is fascinating, but the absence of Cheyenne voices in early twentieth-century accounts and in this narrative raises familiar questions for oral historians about the invisibility of oppressed peoples and our responsibilities in accessing them.

While Leiker and Powers undertook no oral history project proper, their chapter “Memories” integrates multiple mediums, including interviews as well as...

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