Defying the Odds: The Tule River Tribe's Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries (review)

It has become popular for academic scholars to challenge American Indian assertions of "sovereignty" and "culture" in their legal claims.¹ Sovereignty, some critics argue, is a problematic term for Indian tribes because it originates in a Western European legal tradition of absolute dominion over territory, a notion that fits poorly with the colonized status of many indigenous peoples. Culture, the critics contend, has become meaningless because of its inextricably constitutive relationship with concepts such as law and because its fluid nature defies delineation. (What is Navajo culture if some Navajo traditions may have been borrowed from the Spanish, for example?) Moreover, both concepts seem fraught with normative limitations in a global community increasingly characterized by individual autonomy, mobility, and exchange across local and national borders.²

Similar skepticism about sovereignty and culture manifests in federal Indian law decisions. One U.S. Supreme Court justice recently suggested, in a criminal jurisdiction case, that tribal sovereignty may have "ended" in 1871, when Congress stopped signing Indian treaties.³ In another case, a federal appellate court denied application of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act where the human remains in question were apparently "too old" for the claimant tribes to prove their cultural affiliation.⁴ These decisions and many others ignore practical realities: Indian tribes are self-governing entities with civil and criminal lawmaking powers, and Indian tribes do maintain traditional lifeways such as intergenerational obligations to ancestral burial sites. Moreover, many tribal people have embraced the terms sovereignty and culture—originally applied to them by outsiders—to describe their own status and experiences, deploying these terms in legal struggles and imbuing them with indigenous meaning in the process.⁵ The refusal of courts, scholars, and others to listen to such advocacy is frustrating, to say the least, for tribal advocates.⁶

Defying the Odds: The Tule River Tribe's Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries is refreshingly poised to free the discourse on tribal sovereignty and culture from its often stilted cadence. Coauthored by anthropologist Gelya Frank and legal scholar Carole Goldberg, the book models what anthropology and law can learn from one another, namely, that sovereignty and culture may well be mutually reinforcing, subject to legitimate substantive critique, and even blurry around the edges, but they are nonetheless meaningful concepts for those who wish to understand the experiences of indigenous people on their own terms. Employing what they call "post-colonialist scholarship," Frank and Goldberg seek to give "equal weight" to "outward historical circumstances" (14) and "the ways in which those circumstances were experienced" (295n24) by indigenous peoples themselves.⁷ In the case of the Tule River Indian tribe, as for many Indian nations, giving weight to the tribal perspective requires viewing history in terms of sovereignty and culture, concepts that have animated centuries of indigenous struggle for survival.

The authors are well situated to present a tribally focused history of the Tule River people. Anthropologist Frank brings decades of fieldwork with the tribe as well as her insights into the research of anthropologists who have preceded her. Lawyer Goldberg has worked with the tribe in drafting the tribal constitution and code provisions. Describing themselves as "engaged scholars," Frank and Goldberg aspire to share Tule River tribal viewpoints, offering what they describe as the first scholarly history of the tribe. The book is notably rich in first-person accounts, photographs, maps, timelines, and extensive footnotes, giving the reader the sense that Defying the Odds is not only a compelling story but also an important repository of tribal information.

The book begins with an introduction situating the Tule River tribal history in a broader review of "sovereignty," providing a useful exposition of that term's various meanings in international law, federal Indian law, and indigenous thinking. Influenced by numerous scholars, the authors explain their approach as "tracking the dynamic between political and cultural sovereignty." In this...