Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands by Zoltan Grossman (review)

zoltan grossman, a geography and Native studies professor at Evergreen State College, traverses the greater western United States, documenting understudied instances of Native and rural white collaboration in the face of common environmental threats. Beyond a series of case studies, Unlikely Alliances offers a framework for understanding collaboration between groups that historically have had acrimonious relationships in a shared place. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from geography, critical race theory, federal Indian law, rural sociology, and Native American studies, Grossman engages questions of scale ("at what geographic scales can alliances best construct common ground?" [6]), methodology (what organizing strategies work across groups divided by race, privilege, and history?), and temporality, examining collaborations bounded by space but not necessarily by time.

Grossman begins Unlikely Alliances with a personal introduction explaining why—as the child of a Holocaust survivor father and a Catholic mother—finding commonality in difference is intrinsic to his identity. Indeed, he grounds the intersections of universalism and particularism as deeply personal and not mutually exclusive in either his sense of self or his lifelong commitment to work as an ally with both Native nations and rural white communities.

Highlighting shared love of land, a commitment to rural livelihoods, and place-based family ties, Grossman finds swaths of common ground between tribal members and white settlers opposing common corporate foes. He names particular political tools that each group brings to the table—such as the power of treaty rights held by Native nations, and the useful political connections held by rural white communities—and examines how these have been used effectively together. Grossman also acknowledges the messy, painful, and imperfect work of alliance building, documenting false starts and instances of entrenched conflict exacerbated by external divide-and-conquer tactics.

With over thirty years of experience working alongside Native and white rural community leaders to protect health and homelands from militarization and extraction, Grossman believes that cooperation between Native and non-Native rural organizers has "become almost commonplace" (273). He outlines three conditions central to Native/non-Native alliances—a common place, a common purpose, and a common understanding—and examines the ways in which these factors may be defined and juxtaposed in order to result in alliances that endure and accomplish their goals. He considers the development of "a more universalist nationalism" (284) grounded in Indigenous values that recognize human-land relationships as embodied, reciprocal, responsible, spiritual, and enduring.

Unlikely Alliances aims to serve "as a type of guide to Native and non-Native community organizers and leaders in the beginning stages of building alliances against new mines, pipelines or other projects" (xv). While the book focuses on Native-white relationships, it lays a productive foundation for additional work on cross-cultural alliances between Native nations and their other diverse neighbors (including African Americans, Chicanx or Latinx communities, Arab Americans, and Asian Americans).

Unlikely Alliances is particularly salient in a contemporary context of both political gridlock and increasing environmental threats. With specific attention to each rural context, Grossman acknowledges complexity and the dynamic intersecting factors that allow Native/white alliances to thrive or, conversely, to erode and dissolve. The lessons he offers from rural Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Nevada, and beyond support the place-based work of constructing collaboration across lines of historic conflict.