The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature: Indigenous Peoples and the Great Lakes Environment by Karl S. Hele, ed. (review)

114 The Michigan Historical Review the overall value of Faber’s work, but they do highlight one of the possible pitfalls of relying on secondary sources when writing about history. David G. Chardavoyne Farmington Hillls, MI Karl S. Hele, ed. The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature: Indigenous Peoples and the Great Lakes Environment. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Pp. 372. Illustrations. Cloth, $85.00. It is always a challenge to assemble a coherent set of interrelated scholarly essays while also letting the individual authors have their say. Karl Hele’s solution was to ask seventeen contributors to take their cue from John MacKenzie’s pathbreaking Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires (1997), which grounds the essays in several common themes: “the power of nature and attempts by empires . . . to control the environment” in the past; contemporary issues facing First Nations communities in the Great Lakes region; and “the epistemological chasm” between the different inhabitants of the region (xiii). The book’s organization reflects this agenda. The first five chapters deal with methodological and philosophical issues such as the Western roots of environmental history, environmental education, and the prospects for bridging academic and indigenous environmental science. Chapters 6-10 are case studies in the “nature of empire,” and the last five chapters explore the narrative strategies and alternative historicities that can be brought to bear on the subject. The weakest connections are between the methodological chapters that open the volume and the rest of the book. These essays could have been explicitly referenced by the other authors, but neither the prescriptions nor the examples of MacKenzie on environmental history, Lori-Beth Hallock on place-based education, or Brian Rice on indigenous environmental science consistently find expression in the following ten chapters. The essays build in thematic coherence from chapter six onwards. Lianne Leddy’s study of “The Effects of the Uranium Industry on the Serpent River First Nation,” Maureen Riche’s account of her experiences while trying to bring “humane” (outsider) veterinary medicine to a Native community in northern Ontario, and Ute Liscke’s and Rick Fehr’s absorbing literary analyses of Louise Erdrich’s writings Book Reviews 115 and the enduring ghost story of The Baldoon Mystery provide exceptional insights into the empires of nature and the nature of empires. Some of the volume’s themes inevitably shoulder their way to the fore, while others, such as “the power of nature,” get rather less attention. Karen Travers and Rhonda Telford highlight the centrality of boundaries and deeds—the power of British treaty-making and surveying technology—to settler colonialism. Others demonstrate how industry frequently offloads the environmental consequences of their activities onto Native communities. Nearly all of the contributors address the emotional and cultural dimensions of empire, nature, and indigenous persistence. Ironically, the Great Lakes themselves barely figure in this book. (Rivers do, though—an interesting pattern that goes unremarked). Readers familiar with the region will nevertheless sense the Lakes’ implicit presence throughout and will bring to these essays the geographical knowledge (there are no maps) to properly contextualize the authors’ accounts of environmental health risks at Walpole Island (Christianne Stephens and Regna Darnall), diasporic indigenous life in London, Ontario (Mariá Christina Manzano-Munguía), and other topics. One need not know the region well, however, to appreciate the authors’ palpable love of these places—not merely as scenery, but as the homes to the peoples of the Great Lakes. James D. Rice State University of New York, Plattsburgh Mark Hoffman, ed. Among the Enemy: A Michigan Soldier’s Civil War Journal. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. Pp. 168. Illustrations. Paper, $24.95. Among the Enemy captures the three-year enlistment period of Union soldier William Horton Kimball. Originally from Michigan, Kimball served in the First Michigan Engineers and Mechanics regiment from September 1861 to November 1864. Kimball’s story is enhanced by the deft and sensible editing of Mark Hoffman. Hoffman is a member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and author of My Brave Mechanics: The First Michigan Engineers and Their Civil War, also from Wayne State University Press. Hoffman argues that William Horton Kimball’s...