Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954 (review)

This is a dense, detailed, and rewarding book. For any student of Indian self-determination, the time required to go through it will be well spent. But it will take some effort; it is not a gripping read.

Rosier's primary interest is the political development of the Blackfeet Nation. Known as a scourge of the Rocky Mountain fur trade early in the nineteenth century, the Blackfeet Indians had been confined to a reservation in northwestern Montana by the mid-1880s. Like other Indian nations, the Blackfeet experienced not only confinement but political repression, forcibly brought under the paternalistic controls of the Interior Department's Office of Indian Affairs (OIA).

Today, the Blackfeet Tribe, to a significant degree, is a self- governing entity. Rosier's topic is how they managed to achieve that status during the four crucial decades after 1910. His method is classic archival digging, systematically going through OIA correspondence, the minutes of tribal and federal meetings, and assorted other documents, combined with close readings of the work of other scholars and interviews with such prominent Blackfeet as Earl Old Person, who first moved into tribal politics just as the period Rosier examines was coming to a close. The result is a meticulous narrative that traces the evolution of tribal political thinking, organization, and action, as well as national policy developments to which the tribe so often had to respond.

This close look at the tribal political arena is the book's great strength. Although federal decisions shaped much of the tribal agenda, Rosier is much more interested in what the Blackfeet were doing and thinking than in what the federal government was. Thus, for example, the Indian Reorganization Act ( IRA) of 1934—a watershed piece of federal legislation—looms over much of the book, but instead of reprising federal policymaking, the book examines how the Blackfeet perceived, interrogated, fought over, acted on, implemented, and used the IRA . By tracing nearly two decades of Blackfeet struggle with this legislation, Rosier demolishes any inclination to categorize it as either good or bad. It emerges instead as a complex component of Blackfeet politics, bringing progress, problems, hope, dismay, anger, satisfaction, consternation, and more.

The book's other great contribution is its examination of changing divisions within Blackfeet society, in particular the intersections between ethnicity, perceived in either genealogical or cultural terms, and class. As both intermarriage and economic development—modest as it was—advanced, they transformed the social terrain of internal Blackfeet politics. The book follows the changing tensions between upwardly mobile citizens and the poor, between the more acculturated and the less, between the desire for economic security and the call of tribal culture, and between tribal and corporate visions of the nation. Over time, demographic, economic, and cultural forces gradually reorganized internal politics along economic instead of cultural lines.