Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (review)

The relationship between Native Americans and academic theory has often been contentious, ranging from Vine Deloria, Jr.'s, critique of "anthropologists and other friends" in Custer Died for Your Sins (New York, 1969), to the more recent controversy over the scholarly acclaim for—and scathing Pueblo responses to—Ramon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (Stanford, 1991). Appropriately, the title of Clearing a Path invokes a metaphor of diplomacy—the clearing away of obstacles to understanding and communication—as a central motif in its effort to achieve a rapprochement between scholarly theory and meaningful studies of Native American history.

Clearing a Path contains eight essays ranging from a re-examination of the utility of historical materialism in analyzing Native American history to the potential application of hypertext media in presenting that history. Loosely grouped around the poles of narrative and storytelling, social and cultural categories, political economy, and tribal and indigenous histories, the essays do not complement each other so much as present different perspectives, some of which do not always see eye-to-eye.

Although grounded in theory, none of the essays is based on glassy-eyed, nonempirical reasoning. The authors, as Shoemaker notes, keep "one eye on the fruitful possibilities [of theory] and the other eye on the limitations" (xi). This approach is exemplified in the paired essays by Patricia Albers and Jacki Thompson Rand. Albers advocates the use of a culturally sensitive form of historical materialism to bridge "the divide between cultural constructs and material conditions" (127). Rather than speak from a strict materialist perspective, Albers proposes a dialectical relationship between materialist theories and postmodern relativism thatengages both Western colonial economic systems and the cultural imperatives of kinship, sharing, giving, and generosity that structure indigenous communities. Rand, conversely, applies Appadurai's work on the social life of things to explain how Kiowa social conventions and values enabled Kiowas to negotiate federal policies that sought bothto assimilate them into the marketplace and isolate them on a reservation.¹

With its multiple voices, Clearing a Path does not attempt to avoid the complexities involved in studying diverse peoples and communities once placed in a single category by misguided European explorers, but the confrontations that result are often left implicit. As an example, in discussing new ways of presenting tribal histories, Craig Howe notes the place and people-specific connotations of tribalism, whereas James Brooks examines the influence of migration, movement, and plasticity of identity in Native histories, as well as the irony of certain claims to indigenous nationhood as representing "the last vestige of unbroken and uninterrupted ... heritage and identity" (200).

Indeed, the strength of Clearing a Path lies not in the answers that it provides but in the questions that it provokes. Whether or not it succeeds in building a common understanding or merely contributes to an ongoing dialogue, it represents an important contribution to the philosophical, intellectual, and political questions inherent in Native American studies.