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  • Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History ed. by Susan A. Miller and James Riding In
  • Julianne Newmark (bio)
Susan A. Miller and James Riding In , eds. Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-89672-732-8. 384 pp.

The volume Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History, edited by Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, is a useful and [End Page 107] tightly curated collection of essays by prominent Native scholars, all united in a mission to "challenge academic hegemony" and to "expose the dishonesty of . . . hegemonic myths," as the editors reveal in their introduction. As a supplement to the primary textual materials most examined by scholars of Indigenous literatures, this collection of essays reveals the disciplinary decolonization tactics used by Indigenous historians, tactics employed in academic and home-community domains.

As Susan A. Miller writes in the volume's opening essay, "Native America Writes Back: The Origins of the Indigenous Paradigm in Historiography," the writing of Indigenous history must serve Indian communities, as must American Indian studies as a discipline. In this way the sharp contrast with traditional American historical study is drawn: the work of Indigenous historiographers is decidedly not neutral (38). In such work, names are named and events are described accurately with terms such as atrocity or genocide, which non-Native historians have typically avoided (14). Indian communities must benefit by the work, and Indigenous historiography must not "encode the innocence of the nation-state in their invasions and seizures of Indigenous peoples' lands" (23). Such explanations indicate the tenor of this collection and its relevance to scholars of Indigenous literatures, for whom this volume can serve as a companion to titles in literary studies that advocate for Indigenous/tribal approaches to Native texts and the application of theoretical, analytic lenses that emerge from Native communities and discourses (well-known texts in this vein are Robert Allen Warrior's Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions; Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Warrior's American Indian Literary Nationalism; and Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism).

Native Historians Write Back begins with Miller and Riding In's useful introduction, which positions the text as one unapologetically designed to first address and then reject colonial paradigms as they pertain to the telling of Indigenous histories. The four sections that follow feature previously published works by leading Indigenous historians from many tribes. The first section, "Challenging Colonial Thought," features two essays by Miller along with essays by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Lomayumtewa C. Ishii. In her essay that begins the section, Miller identifies the specific inheritance, from the meeting of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in 1975, of the directive that Indigenous historiography must not "encode the innocence of nation-states in their invasions [End Page 108] and seizures of Indigenous people's lands" (23). Cook-Lynn's examination of the Lewis and Clark story unites the territorial and the textual as she decries the forms of American celebratory history in which "the white . . . individual . . . [is] at the center . . . and the Native is a mere prop" (47). Similarly, Ishii engages the question of the appropriateness of using non-Indigenous theories even in his own study (such as in his application of Edward Said's and Mary Louise Pratt's approaches). He proposes a "for Hopis by Hopis" mechanism, a theme that resonates in the theoretical designs outlined by the authors in the remaining sections of the volume.

Section 2 of the collection, "Affirming Indigenous Historical Narratives," features essays by Vine Deloria Jr., Matthew L. Jones, Winona Stevenson, and Leanne Simpson. A passage of Deloria's accurately captures the authorial objectives of the essays in this section, all of which reveal a debt to Deloria's valuable work on affirming the essential and critical value of Indigenous oral testimony. In the 1977 essay "The United States Has No Jurisdiction in Sioux Territory," included as the first essay in this section, Deloria writes, "Many of us feel that the oral tradition is . . . more accurate in preserving the spirit and meaning of . . . negotiations than the written record or any attempt by a state...

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