Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy by Janet Dean, and: Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press ed. by Jacqueline Emery (review)

In the literary recovery of women and marginalized writers, Janet Dean and Jacqueline Emery advance two different strategies. For Dean, recovery comes from revisiting and reframing four nineteenth-century women writers—Sarah Wakefield, Lydia Sigourney, S. Alice Callahan, and Ora Eddleman—often dismissed or overlooked for the assimilationist politics seemingly present in their writings. She argues for their work as pushing against, rather than conforming to, the political constraints of genre conventions, which "did not easily accommodate political outrage" in response to US Indian policy (1). For Emery, recovery comes from expanding the dimensions of Native literary studies to include student and professional writers for boarding school newspapers who have also been largely overlooked because of the intended assimilationist work of the newspapers. Emery challenges readers to question any preconceived notions of boarding school newspapers as categorical tools of assimilation and provides a diverse sampling of writings that complicate and even defy assimilation.

Unconventional Politics builds on previous decades of recovery scholarship for women writers that have argued for the political work of sentimental literature and its power of sympathy, yet Dean expands the scholarship to other genres and print forms, such as the captivity narrative, poetry, and the magazine. In doing so, she takes on a challenging era and set of writers, both of which weigh heavy with assimilationist politics. She seeks to resituate her writers, however, as "writer-activists" who worked to make their voices heard from beneath the muffling effects of assimilation and genre (2). Although Dean readily admits that their literary politics "were less overt than others," she successfully argues for readings that consider implicit as well as explicit political expression (3). As she puts it, "All four of my subjects turned to popular print as a side entrance to public debate. Convention was the price of admission, but it also widened the entryway into the political realm" (5).

Dean's argument shines through most compellingly in her fourth chapter, in which she advances not only the recovery of the Native woman writer and editor Ora Eddleman but also the recovery of Eddleman's Twin Territories: The Indian Magazine (1898–1904), the first mass-distributed commercial magazine published by Native Americans. While Dean describes Eddleman's magazine as mostly assimilationist, she insightfully points out that the magazine's serial and heterogeneous form fosters democratic public debate over current issues while including Native perspectives in a mainstream arena. In addition to a deft and multifaceted analysis of the magazine's writing, illustrations, and correspondence column, Dean gives the reader a thorough bibliographical sense of the publication itself. She also contextualizes her analysis in a fresh discussion about the political work of the magazine genre in Indian Country and beyond without letting the larger contextual dialogues tug her or the reader away from the focus of the chapter. The chapter supplements its scholarship on women's literature with discussions of the periodical's striking photographic images and racial phenotypes, even while maintaining an engaging and focused narrative. Taken together, Dean adroitly argues for the landmark contributions both Eddleman and her magazine make to Indigenous literary history.

Dean's first chapter, on Sarah Wakefield's Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees (1864), also contains a compelling rereading of the captivity narrative, which Dean asks readers to consider in regard not only to Wakefield's physical capture but also to her literary "capture" within the constrictions of genre conventions. As Dean poignantly writes, Wakefield "found herself caught in the impasse of the witness whose testimony is nameless, the activist who cannot fully articulate her dissent, and, worst of all, the subject who cannot fully process her experience...