Laura Cornelius Kellogg: Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works ed. by Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu (review)

labra cornelius kellogg: our democracy and the american indian and other works is a collection of the surviving writings of the Wisconsin Oneida public intellectual and advocate who was involved in organizations such as the Society of American Indians and other activist circles during the first half of the twentieth century. Editors Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu have assembled short stories, poems, and essays written while Kellogg was enrolled in secondary school and at Stanford University and Barnard College, as well as publications, speeches, and testimony from later periods of her career. These texts are reproduced in their entirety, bringing back into circulation works, such as Our Democracy and the American Indian (1920), that have been out of print for nearly a century. In addition to these writings, Ackley and Stanciu have compiled a chronology of Kellogg’s life and an appendix of selected newspaper articles published throughout her career. The editors’ extended introduction complements this robust collection of writings and supplementary material.

In their introduction to the collection, Ackley and Stanciu position Laura Cornelius Kellogg as an intellectual and activist who, while controversial, was deeply grounded in the Wisconsin Oneida community, where she grew up and made enduring contributions to the tribal nation that have gone largely unacknowledged (8). As they contextualize Kellogg’s life, the editors draw sharp distinctions between the present day, when Wisconsin Oneidas’ discourse about tribal affairs exudes assurance of “continuance and persistence,” and Kellogg’s lifetime, when the nation faced tremendous social, political, economic, and legal challenges (1–2). They argue that Kellogg promoted an innovative vision of the reservation as a space of economic opportunity, and that her work on educational initiatives and innovative legal strategy relating to land claims presented important alternatives for Wisconsin Oneidas navigating the treacherous assimilation era. Additionally, they note Kellogg’s attention to clan affiliation, stressing its long-term significance for some Wisconsin Oneidas who used this documentation for later initiatives surrounding the clan system (59). This nuanced discussion of Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s work breaks with dominant interpretations of her life, especially those connected with the Iroquoianist school of scholarship that have long emphasized declension narratives in their interpretations of six nations experiences and have suggested that Kellogg’s life was marked by tragedy. The editors instead develop an analysis of Kellogg’s life that acknowledges the tremendous challenges Wisconsin Oneidas faced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the role that Kellogg sought to play at that time, and the enduring (if unacknowledged) significance of her work.

This collection makes an important contribution to a number of streams of scholarship in Native American and Indigenous studies. It adds to the growing body of publications that bring work by Native writers and orators back into circulation. Barry O’Connell’s edited collection of William Apess’s work, On Our Own Ground, which has circulated widely since its initial publication in 1992, is an early example of the recovery work that literary scholars have undertaken over the past generation. Collections of Samson Occom’s writing and the oratory of Red Jacket are but two examples of more recent projects in this vein. This recovery work, which requires substantial, sustained engagement with archives in order to recover rare manuscripts and publications, complements and reinforces scholarship in American Indian intellectual and literary history. Additionally, as Ackley and Stanciu make clear in their introduction to Laura Cornelius Kellogg, and others have argued before them, collecting a body of writing by a particular author facilitates scholarly research and teaching about, and community understandings of, particular tribal nations’ past and present realities. With this publication, Ackley and Stanciu enlarge our understanding of Wisconsin Oneida history and the work of Haudenosaunee women. They challenge readers to think more broadly about the Society of American Indians and early twentieth-century activism by Native people. And, importantly, they contribute to a growing stream of scholarship...