Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (review)

Paige Raibmon has written a path-breaking book that investigates one of the most controversial topics in Native studies and American Indian history: cultural authenticity. Raibmon's approach to this mercurial issue may well serve as a benchmark for how scholars address other facets of Indigenous identity. She argues that authenticity is a discursive construct situated within specific places, eras, and contexts rather than an "objective" term transcending time and space. Rooting her analysis in the culturally diverse Pacific Northwest coast, Raibmon looks at the ways in which groups such as the Kwakwaka'wakw, Tlingit, and others encountered outsiders; engaged foreign notions such as modernity, progress, tradition, and civilization; and reshaped those concepts to fit their culturally defined goals and efforts at survival.

Authentic Indians has a multilayered agenda that draws from the fields of cultural anthropology, Native American studies, post-colonial criticism, and ethnohistory. Her emphasis on encounters between Indigenous peoples and the settler societies that invade their lands delineates how non-Native policymakers, religious groups, anthropologists, bureaucrats, artists, and others constructed a false baseline for Native culture against which all changes would be defined as cultural loss. But this is more than a book about "Indian-White relations." Emphasizing the rich matrix of mid to late-nineteenth-century cross-cultural interaction, the discourse of authenticity became a hegemonic notion that worked hand in hand with dichotomies such as future-past, pagan-Christian, static-dynamic, masculine-feminine, rational-irrational, and others that non-Natives used to define, order, and control Native peoples. Native peoples participated in and frequently challenged these "tensions of empire" by exploiting stereotypes for tribal advantage or by directly participating in activities labeled "modern," such as picking hops, driving automobiles, and accumulating cash.

Raibmon divides the book into three sections, each focusing on different encounters between Indians and non-Indians. Chapters 1 through 3 address local politics and colonial relations as manifested in trade relationships, land conflicts, and assimilation policies. In particular, potlatches held by the Kwakwaka'wakw and other groups reflected the debates over authenticity, tradition, and progress because non-Indians viewed the practice as retrogressive and emblematic of cultures trapped in the past, while Indigenous peoples used them to maintain social obligations and kinship networks. The Chicago World's Fair and Exposition of 1893 also plays a central role in Raibmon's analysis. As staging grounds for nationalism, imperialism, and modernity, the fairs are seen by Raibmon as sites where authenticity was constructed by both the architects of the fair and the attending Native peoples. Kwakwaka'wakws attended the fair and participated in dances and performances that reflected their common beliefs about gender relations and leadership roles by refusing to follow a script devised by non-Indians. Although dances were spatially and culturally decontextualized, they nonetheless allowed participants to work within the context of modernity and simultaneously reinscribe their humanity and identity.

Chapters 4 through 7 focus on the intersection of cultural adaptation, movement, and transborder migrant labor. Set against the dual images of Native peoples as culturally static because they are fixed in space, or in contrast, because they seemingly wander without purpose, authenticity plays out in contradictory ways around Puget Sound. Native workers in hops fields constituted a significant portion of the labor force of an important regional industry that tribal members ironically used to maintain kinship networks and cultural ties to historically important places. Ironically their work in a modern industry marked by capitalism contributed to non-Indians' perceptions that Native people were aimless wanderers. The participation of Aboriginal people in the hop industry also spawned a tourist industry steeped in stereotypical notions of Indians as antimodern and primitive peoples. This curious situation of a capitalist tourist industry based on the alleged premodern actions of tribal peoples eventually contributed to a larger regional economy linked to land development and the growth of a non Native population that in turn called for greater controls on and alterations...