Native Nations: The Survival of Fourth World Peoples ed. by Sharlotte Neely (review)

History has often been written, understood, and remembered through the interpretive lens of so-called First World nations. One of the dangers and deficits of history making from such privileged perspectives is the way it becomes the dominant understanding, often ignoring and silencing the experiences of Indigenous peoples. As the activist Arundhati Roy once noted, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard” (Sydney Peace Prize lecture, 4 Nov 2004). Many scholars and policy makers ensconced in colonial and postcolonial nations continue to understand and thus interact with Indigenous peoples as groups who should remain deliberately silenced or preferably unheard. Effective work to redress the injustices brought by First World nations against Indigenous peoples, and particularly those of the “Fourth World,” begins with addressing the ignorance and lack of deep understanding of the brutality and traumas that characterize Indigenous peoples’ past and present experiences with First World nations. Characterized as a needful restorative process, this move toward redress through scholarly engagement is at the heart of the work that Sharlotte Neely and seven contributors offer in Native Nations: The Survival of Fourth World Peoples.

A professor of anthropology and director of Native American Studies at Northern Kentucky University, Neely defines the term “Fourth World peoples” for the purposes of the book as “the surviving Indigenous (Native, Aboriginal) minorities within the wealthier First World nations” (iii). Gathering an impressive group of scholars to engage comparatively with seven Fourth World peoples, the volume offers significant insight into contemporary Pacific contexts, with chapters on Native Australians by Robert Tonkinson, Māori by Margaret Mutu, and Native Hawaiians by ‘Umi Perkins. Other chapters address Native North Americans, Ainu in Japan, Sámi in Scandinavia, and Breton Celts in France. The book serves as an important source of diverse Indigenous histories, discusses key legal cases and policies that directly affect the current situations of Fourth World peoples, and highlights the strength, resilience, and success of Indigenous Pacific Island communities that continue to negotiate, resist, and contest centuries of colonization by their First World colonizers. Identifying variously as Fourth World person, anthropologist, geographer, linguist, or political scientist, each of the authors works to provide a fuller picture of the situations of Indigenous minorities than has previously been provided.

Though there are common themes that link the experiences of Fourth World peoples, each of the groups discussed in the volume grapples with contexts unique only to that community. For example, speaking from his experience as Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian), Perkins states, “In 1988, at age 16, I attended a very early sovereignty rally with my mother, a professor of Hawaiian literature. The rally was organized by Kekuni Blaisdell, a physician who is now considered the father of the sovereignty movement. … Yet here was a Hawaiian, very successful in the newly-Westernized Hawai‘i, advocating the idea of not being American at all. It was a difficult idea to grasp, but within five years the notion that one model of sovereignty would be implemented was considered inevitable” (136). For Native Hawaiians, issues surrounding sovereignty and self-determination are notable for a visceral and public cry for a decolonization of the mind and an ongoing struggle to be defined not only as an ethnicity but as a political group, something advocated by Blaisdell. Such a change in status is argued to provide the possibility for a profound restoration of Kanaka Maoli political rights. Although former US President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology in 1993 that acknowledged the Hawaiian government overthrow, there has yet to be any significant action that accompanies the apology.

Much like Kānaka Maoli, Australia’s Aboriginal people have experienced a difficult and too-often tragic relationship with the state. As Tonkinson observes, “Relations with government at all levels have generally been fraught. Following colonization, and especially after federation...