Native American Reversal of Fortune: American Indian Colonialism and Its Aftermath

Of the many ironies of our time, the recent ascendancy of American Indian economic and political fortunes remains among the least interrogated. Indeed, as the U.S. and to a lesser extent Canadian welfare states become increasingly dismantled, American Indian communities have regained and/or developed unprecedented degrees of sovereignty. In several states, the once poorest of the poor are now helping to subsidize legislative budgets. While uneven, this American Indian reversal of fortune represents a new historical epoch as enhanced forms of political, cultural, and economic autonomy now reverberate throughout Indian country.

One need not look too far back to see an obverse situation when concentrated forms of power in the hands of government and corporate institutions imperiled democratic freedoms, and when threats to individual and communal liberties often arrived professing various, assured forms of salvation. Thanks to two impressive and timely studies, scholars can better gauge the extent of these "deadening years," as Charles Wilkinson describes the first half-century following American Indian reservation confinement. In Blood Struggle, Wilkinson overviews twentieth-century U.S. Indian history, beginning with familiar tales of government dominion over reservation communities, land and resource alienation, religious persecution, and above all extreme impoverishment. Whereas Wilkinson returns to these familiar subjects in order to launch his subsequent investigation of Indian self-determination, Paige Raibmon in Authentic Indians lingers in the reservation era, uncovering a wealth of insights into the nature and practices of colonialism along the Northwest Coast. Combined, both further expose the expansive reach of state control over America's indigenous communities while also detailing the myriad ways Indian peoples received and refashioned such incursions.

The timeliness of Blood Struggle is among its primary achievements, and it may soon become the definitive account of American Indian political resurgence. With blurbs from Republican and Democratic senators, tribal leaders, and the dean of American Indian Studies, Vine Deloria Jr., Wilkinson interlaces his lifelong career in Indian law with moving narratives of tribal communities bordering on the "abyss" of political disappearance. Potentially overdramatized, Wilkinson's impassioned claim that "the middle of the twentieth century . . . marked the all-time low for tribal existence on this continent" nonetheless restores direly needed attention to the middle decades of the twentieth century, when the federal government attempted a final solution to America's "Indian problem" (xii). Aptly named, "Termination" set in motion a series of political shock waves across tribal communities while also laying the seeds for its own destruction. By threatening to terminate the federal trust status of America's Indian reservations and thereby place tribal communities under the jurisdiction of state governments, Termination, legislated in 1953, fueled the rise of a generation of American Indian community members who made reversing Termination their primary commitment: "Indian people realized that something had to be done and that they could count upon nobody save themselves. That realization became a major impetus for the gathering of the modern tribal sovereignty movement" (86). Within two decades, that movement began achieving profound results, reversing Termination while laying the foundations for more recent gains.

Tales of Termination and Indian activism have been told before, but never has the entire postwar era been synthesized in such fashion.¹ Divided into four parts, Blood Struggle combines Wilkinson's meticulous understandings of Indian law and policy with sensitive portraits of everyday people fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds, particularly during the 1960s when Indian leaders began sowing the seeds of self-determination. Chaotic, surprising, and above all contingent upon a host of personalities, court rulings, and changing American cultural values, the modern sovereignty movement was forged in both spectacular and everyday fashion.

Gauging the achievements of this generation becomes, then, Wilkinson's ultimate task, and recognition of the extent of their multiple accomplishments pervades the text. Whereas many assessments of Termination culminate with...