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

  • Mr. Indigenous Goes to Washington: Making Indian Law and Policy in the Twentieth Century
  • Libby R. Tronnes (bio)
Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory. By Christian McMillen. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. 304 pages. $25.00 (paper).
Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity. By J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. 264 pages. $79.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper).

At the 2005 “Narrating Native Histories in the Americas” conference held in Madison, Wisconsin, the closing remarks produced a rowdy debate. The conference’s aim was to initiate a conversation about producing more collaborative histories between scholars and the communities about which they write. Many of the papers presented and the ensuing discussions revolved around the historically intertwined relationship between “vanishing” Indigenous peoples and evolving academic disciplines, most notably anthropology. The products and consequences of these historical intersections have produced problematic “colonial residues” that shaped the often limited and ahistorical ways in which scholars, lawmakers, and officials (as well as everyday people) thought about Indian peoples throughout much of the twentieth century. One question that emerged during the conference produced a palpable tension in the room: who gets the privilege to produce histories about Indigenous peoples? A personal family story and critique of early-twentieth-century anthropologists from a prominent Indian scholar of Native American history initiated the debate. The argument rapidly swelled to include a well-known non-Native anthropologist who felt his academic field was being unfairly snubbed and an emerging Native Hawaiian scholar who reminded everyone that such methodological and moral sins of disciplines in the past continue to affect everyday lives and legal battles for Native peoples today. Such conversations, while difficult, have done much to shape recent works by both Native and non-Native scholars. This new writing [End Page 153] has often moved beyond more antiquated disciplinary and epistemological boundaries and produced better and more inclusive interdisciplinary histories.

Historical discussions of Native sovereignty and the colonial practices that have undermined it often excite such fiery moments precisely because modern Indigenous sovereignty struggles are inextricably linked with this past. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Christian W. McMillen’s recent works detailing historical and legal constructions of Indigenous identities and land claims take us a long way toward better understanding this reality and its sometimes sharp, frustrating presence for Indigenous peoples in the twenty-first century.

For American Indians and Native Hawaiians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the legacy of U.S. colonialism continues to manifest itself in paternalistic laws, powerful corporate interests, and narrowed interpretations of Indigenous identities and pasts. One of its most persistent effects is diminished sovereignty and identity for Native peoples everywhere. Kauanui’s Hawaiian Blood and McMillen’s Making Indian Law reveal that such “colonial” constructions were rarely the creation of non-Indigenous entities alone. Native activists from the Kanaka Maoli of Hawai‘i and the Hualapai of Arizona played central roles in shaping federal Indian policy and law, for better or worse. In 1920 and 1921 Kanaka Maoli and white territorial representatives convened in Washington, D.C., on three different occasions to debate a land-lease program for Native Hawaiians, which ultimately became the Hawaiian House Committee Act (HHCA). Kauanui examines the legal construction of “Native Hawaiian” under the “50-percent rule” that came out of these debates and the implications of this rule for modern sovereignty struggles. McMillen traces a thirty-year Hualapai reservation land claim that culminated in the “twentieth century’s first major decision concerning Indian land rights” (165). Blood quantum, reservations, and major court decisions are products of the encounters between Indigenous communities and U.S. colonialism.

Kauanui begins her book at her uncle’s home in Kaua‘i where she, then a graduate student, returned home for a traditional Kanaka Maoli first birthday lu‘au celebrating her cousin’s baby. A member of the other Kanaka Maoli family abruptly challenged Kauanui’s “Hawaiinness.” Kauanui was unwilling to argue with another Kanaka Maoli over belonging while sitting in her family’s home, but Kauanui’s uncle spoke up for her: “She get about 51 percent” (2). The challenger, the...

pdf

Share