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  • Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands by Brenden W. Rensink
  • Hans M. Carlson (bio)
Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands. By Brenden W. Rensink. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $40.00 hardcover)

Most good histories resonate in the present, and this is certainly the case with Brenden Rensink's well-researched and well-written Native but Foreign—a comparative study of "foreign" Native peoples' experience with crossing our national borders and establishing homelands in the western United States. Their stories span various parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Rensink's book provides a comparison of their differing experiences in achieving recognition from the U.S. government. This recognition consisted of a grant of status within the federal-tribal structure that delineates Native sovereignty in this country, as well as the designation of tribal lands on which to build communities.

Rensink moves between northern and southern borders throughout the book, comparing the experiences of the "Canadian" Cree and Chippewa, in what today is Montana, and that of the "Mexican" Yaquis who crossed the border to live in Arizona. All these people were driven to move into U.S.–claimed territory because of conflict, though conflicts which were quite different, and these are not the important comparisons for Rensink. It is the differing histories on the U.S. side of the border which are the focus of this book, where Cree, Chippewa, and Yaquis all struggled to become U.S. Indians. For Rensink, local conditions in Montana and Arizona shaped their histories in very different ways, and this is the important part of his comparison. [End Page 113]

Cree and Chippewa involvement, on the Metis side, in the 1885 Northwest Rebellion made them criminals in the eyes of the expansionist Canadian government in Ottawa. With the collapse of the fur trade, Native people who had been economically integral found themselves in the way of a wave of settler colonialism, and the rebellion was the last act in their resistance. Afterward, some found refuge south of the border, in what had been the southern reaches of their traditional territory, but the trade had collapsed in the United States, too. Settler expansion into the northern plains was probably greater than in Canada, and their refuge was tenuous, as both Cree and Chippewa were as marginal to the Montana economy in the late nineteenth century as they were to the Canadian economy. Local opposition to granting status and reservation land, to even more Natives, slowed federal action for decades before either was achieved in 1916.

This was all quite different from the Yaquis' experience in many respects. Their move to Arizona Territory, in the late nineteenth century, was the last act in centuries of conflict with colonial expansion in Mexico. It was not a recent shift in their status as it had been for the Cree and Chippewa in Canada. Most importantly, Yaquis brought skills with them that were economically important to an expanding Arizona. This was manual labor of all kinds, but especially skill in mining, which was an economic focus in the new territory. In Arizona, these "immigrants" were not unwelcome, in what had been the northern region of their traditional territory, but they were largely undifferentiated from Hispanic migrants in the public imagination, and this shaped a much longer process of U.S. recognition. Locals saw Yaquis as Mexicans and were disinterested in federal recognition, even though they were more tolerant of the Yaquis' presence.

Yaquis did not achieve recognition until 1975, during a period when the U.S. government acted in numerous areas of the country to settle old issues with Native people—the 1973 Native Claims Settlement Act in Alaska and the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act in 1978. It was at this time that local pressure was outweighed by larger national interests, and this is one of Rensink's arguments. The histories of all these Natives was shaped by the power of local politics and their influence on federal action. Negotiating national boundaries, which were becoming increasingly enforced at the end of the nineteenth century, was not simply...

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