The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma: Resilience through Adversity ed. by Stephen Warren (review)

INCREASINGLY, tribal nations are initiating projects to recover their histories and tell their own stories. Stephen Warren’s edited volume, The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma: Resilience through Adversity, is an outcome of one such project. While Warren is a non-Native scholar, this edited volume is one component of a larger grant-funded initiative directed by the Eastern Shawnee Nation. The project began when the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma began to tackle a situation many tribal nations face: archival materials related to their history are scattered across multiple repositories far from the tribe’s reservation, leaving the materials inaccessible to many tribal citizens. While many archival institutions are working closely with tribal nations to make records more accessible to communities (often digitally), the labor and funding required to conduct archival research and reorganize digital copies of materials in tribally run repositories are still significant.

To address these barriers, the Eastern Shawnee Nation applied for and received a significant grant from the Administration of Native Americans to fund “a search for Eastern Shawnee history” from the end of the War of 1812 through World War II. This was a period of significant political and cultural change for the Eastern Shawnee Nation, yet little is written about it. Most current narratives stop at the conclusion of the War of 1812, giving the impression that Shawnee people disappeared with their well-known leader, Tecumseh. Until this point, published Shawnee history has largely been written by non-Native scholars, many of whom have both subtly and unsubtly perpetuated the common vanishing Indian myth. As Warren notes, there is a real need for a new generation of tribal histories, and this volume is just that.

The first chapters of the book are written by non-Native scholars who have worked with the Eastern Shawnee Nation on this historical recovery project. These chapters are well-researched, nuanced narratives, but the book comes to life in the final two-thirds, where chapters are written primarily by Eastern Shawnee or Shawnee tribal citizens, such as Eastern Shawnee chief Glenna Wallace, second chief Ben Barnes, and tribal citizens Robert J. Miller, Elsie Mae Hoevet, and Catherine Osborne-Gowey. These individuals offer new interpretations of treaties, federal and state laws, tribal leadership, outward migration, and reservation life that are written for a Shawnee audience and exemplify the importance of Shawnee self-representation. These writers exemplify how a process of locating and rereading archival sources can yield new interpretations of history, providing a model for other tribes that are interested in reclaiming and revising the narratives of their own pasts. The volume also features five transcripts from interviews with significant Shawnee leaders, simultaneously documenting Shawnee oral histories while opening the door for new scholarship based on these primary sources. This volume will serve as a significant resource for all readers interested in Shawnee history, one that is undoubtedly more accurate and useful because of significant collaboration with and research completed by Shawnee tribal members themselves.

The volume is a compelling example of historical reclamation projects. Other tribal nations pursuing similar initiatives may consider publishing comparable volumes written especially for tribal audiences and may find the details in the introduction about the overall archival recovery process helpful. The book focuses more on telling a new narrative of Shawnee history than on documenting the processes of locating archival materials and rewriting these narratives. However, readers from other tribes will still find use in reading the volume and especially the source notes to determine what kinds of archives the tribe accessed, what new sources of tribal history they brought to the project, and why the importance of “becoming our own storytellers” is so significant. Future research should place this project among other similar historical reclamation initiatives led by other Indigenous nations and could further consider other aspects of the larger Eastern Shawnee grant project, including returns to Shawnee homelands and the new digital repository of Shawnee archival documents, which will be run by...