Beyond the Reservation: Indians, Settlers, and the Law in Washington Territory, 1853-1889, and: Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (review)

Beyond the Reservation: Indians, Settlers, and the Law in Washington Territory, 1853–1889. By Brad Asher. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. xii + 276 pp., introduction, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.)

Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound. By Alexandra Harmon. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xii + 393 pp., introduction, maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth.)

It is a rare pleasure to review two books that complement each other so well yet make such distinctive and significant contributions of their own. Published just over a month apart, Brad Asher’s Beyond the Reservation and Alexandra Harmon’s Indians in the Making explore related aspects of Indian-white interaction in Washington state. Asher examines the role of law in structuring race relations and shaping racial categories during the territorial period. Harmon chronicles the intercultural dialogue that has continually redefined native identities in the Puget Sound region. Together, these works illuminate the enduring presence of Indians in U.S. society and illustrate what Harmon calls “the complex, ambiguous, and dynamic nature of Indianness in America” (xi).

Harmon became aware of the difficulties of defining Indian identity while working as an attorney for several Puget Sound tribes during the 1970s and 1980s. Indians in the Making reflects both the keen analytical skills she developed in that capacity and the theoretical bent of her training at the University of Washington, where she currently serves as a professor of American Indian studies. As the book’s title suggests, it treats ethnic and racial distinctions as a creative process rather than as a timeless essence. This approach has become quite familiar to scholars in several disciplines, but few historians have applied it to Native American identity. Harmon’s insightful work demonstrates the promise of such studies. Drawing on a wide range of historical and ethnographic evidence, she shows that the seemingly self-evident categories of “Indian” and “tribe” in fact have their own contested histories.

Her discussion of these categories unfolds through a narrative of cultural encounters around Puget Sound, revealing how “the marks and meanings of Indian identity have evolved through decades of negotiation between supposed races” (4). The story begins in the 1820s, when British fur traders first attempted to separate the diverse “Indians” of the region into coherent “tribes.” Contact with the “King George men” created a common protocol for relations, but the indigenous peoples of western Washington did not readily adopt the Europeans’ racial divisions and tribal designations. Individual Indians continued to have multiple associations and multifaceted identities, while the birth of mixed-blood children blurred the lines between native and newcomer. U.S. efforts to sort and segregate Indians merely complicated matters. From the 1840s onward, a steady stream of settlers, journalists, bureaucrats, politicians, jurists, and academics debated the definitions of Indian and tribe. Instead of clarifying these terms, their opinions and policies actually multiplied the cultural, social, and genetic permutations of native identity.

Indians did not simply choose from the options offered to them; rather, they actively participated in the process of negotiation. “Within the framework of laws and federal policies,” Harmon argues, “various descendants of aboriginal people have taken the initiative to define themselves, trying to fashion identities that make sense to them” (247). They often disagreed with each other about who was Indian and why. By the 1970s, however, many had come to regard treaty fishing rights as the preeminent symbol of “Indianness” in western Washington. The struggle to secure those rights did not end the debate over definitions, but it gave Indians the basis for a positive self-representation. By portraying themselves as sovereign communities with unshaken cultural traditions and legal rights, concludes Harmon, they “had at last fashioned an Indian identity with the...