Coming to Terms with Fractions and Factions

The commercials make it seem so simple. A quick test sent through the mail, and six to eight weeks later, your entire ethnic profile will be revealed. People who previously had no knowledge of their African, Latino or Native American roots can now claim a new identity, but to what end? DNA testing appears to have opened a door through which Native American ancestry and identity is only a cheek swab away. Unsurprisingly, the reality is a bit more complicated. Mikaëla Adams explains that unlike other ethnicities, "'Indian' is not merely an ethnic or racial identity; rather it is a political status based on an individual's citizenship in one of several hundred tribal nations" (p. 1). In their respective works, Adams and Raymond Orr reveal the political structures, tenuous sovereignty, and citizenship requirements of various Native communities proving that indigenous identity goes far beyond a simple mail order test.

In Reservation Politics, Raymond Orr explores the correlation between historical trauma and political conflict within reservation communities. This ambitious work engages with contemporary indigenous informants as well as the literature of various social theorists to produce a comprehensive methodology for studying contemporary reservation politics. In crafting his analytical framework, Orr argues that through an analysis of historical trauma and indigenous worldviews, which he defines as "the interpretation about the world and our role in it," we can better understand indigenous political decision making (p. 5). To reinforce this argument, he provides the case studies of three federally recognized tribes, the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, the Isleta Pueblo and the Rosebud Lakota. Through these case studies, Orr expertly applies his method and reveals the ways in which forces like economic opportunity, historical trauma and melancholy converge in the indigenous decision making process.

Orr begins his monograph by detailing the method though which the effect of trauma upon reservation politics can be studied. The author establishes two fundamental assumptions regarding indigenous communities: that they are distinct and that reservation politics is often quite contentious. First, Orr goes to great lengths to convince the reader that Native Americans cannot be simply classified as a cohesive ethnic group, but rather that each tribal organization is inherently unique. Given such an extremely diverse subject matter, Orr relies upon several unifying concepts including common secrets, pain and profit, the logic of self-interest, melancholy, and intergenerational trauma. His detailed analysis of these constructs is useful, but can also be alienating for the casual reader. As the first three chapters of Reservation Politics clearly indicates, this is a scientific study of indigenous people, one replete with figures and graphs. Orr asserts that studies of contemporary reservations indicate that Native politicians, perhaps out of self-interest or as a product factionalism, often do not agree or work harmoniously. In this way, the author enters into an interesting debate between historians of American Indians who find that indigenous political systems are consistently described as contentious or factional. To many, the application of this language suggests that Native politicians operate in a perpetual state of dysfunction, or worse incompetence.

Certainly, in our contemporary political climate, one could argue that all American politicians are subject to contentious behavior. To further explain the use of this analytical lens, Orr acknowledges this critique and successfully argues that in order to generate a comprehensive understanding of reservation politics one must confront both uniformity and discord. As he explains, "The disinclination surrounding intra-ethnic research de-incentivizes inquiry about political relationships between Indians, which, to be accurate and valuable, should include the possibility that Indians work at cross-purposes, undermine each other, or arrive at conflicting worldviews as do participants in every polity" (p. 46). Following this discussion of his methodological framework, Orr then delves into three diverse case studies...