Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (review)

In this penetrating book, Rand extends and deepens recent analyses of American Indians subject to U.S. colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on the theoretical perspectives of Bourdieu, Thomas, and Appadurai, Rand does not intend to “overlook resistance and agency” but to provide “a more holistic picture that includes the unexpected, life-sustaining outcomes of everyday life routines . . . that absorb colonial assaults and carry colonized peoples into the future” (7).¹

Rand begins with a richly detailed account of the “Kiowa scheme of life” prior to the American invasion, when the Kiowas “enjoyed considerable freedom of movement, an independent means for provisioning themselves, and the sovereign right to advance their own interests and choices” (11). In contrast to Kiowa humanity, the “values of the [American] state” were anything but humane (33). Rand focuses especially on the failure of the federal government to provide adequate food to the Kiowas after the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek. Through an analysis of congressional appropriations data, Rand persuasively concludes, “If the Kiowas possessed nothing more than the government goods they actually received, Kiowas would no longer be in existence today” (49).

How, then, did Kiowas survive? One way was through the labor of young Kiowa men, who raided Texas settlements in the 1860s and 1870s. In contrast to U.S. officials, who criminalized these acts as “depredations” and interpreted them as manifestations of a cultural disposition toward war, Rand sees raiding as necessary to avoid starvation in a context of declining game and inadequate treaty rations. Kiowa women’s labor was also crucial to survival. Beadwork produced for the tourist trade purchased vital economic resources. Furthermore, whether created for this purpose or for the community, beadwork was a “political act” in that it “defied the U.S. attack on tribalism and ensured that the Kiowas would retain specific traditional forms and patterns of work” (150).

Rand also offers a compelling analysis of men’s cultural production in the form of ledger drawings by Kiowa prisoners at Fort Marion, Florida. Rather than seeing these works of art as “evidence of nostalgia for a disappearing era,” an interpretation “reinforcing the colonizing nation’s narrative,” Rand offers a more subtle reading, suggesting that they “reveal the double consciousness the men carried and contemplated in their own lives, futures, and identities” (103–104).

In contrast to the main currents in American Indian history, Rand insists on seeing Kiowa survival as part of a larger history of genocide in the Americas. She uses the term genocide several times, noting at one point that “Indian people survived . . . genocide, but were erased from United States history” (9). Though some readers may resist an argument for the pervasiveness of genocide in U.S. history as a return to a discredited historiography of “victimization,” Rand’s account of Kiowa creativity under life-threatening conditions offers a compelling synthesis of agency and oppression, one that asks readers to take genocide seriously while affirming Kiowa—and Native—humanity.