Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed by Alexandra Harmon (review)

as both lawyer and historian, Alexandra Harmon digs into the grass roots of two conflicts involving the authority of Indian tribes to govern and police their own territories. In Quinault v. Gallagher (1966) the Ninth Circuit Court dismissed a claim by the Quinault that their treaty right to exclude "white men" from their reservation necessarily implied authority to regulate nonmembers' behavior without the approval of state laws and police. Twelve years later, in the Oliphant case, about which I have written critically, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Suquamish Tribe's authority is limited to tribal members who have, expressly or by implication, consented to be subject to tribal laws. The net result of these decisions was to deprive Indian tribes of full territorial sovereignty, in contempt of treaties. This was a setback for tribes at the time, to be sure, and a racialist blot on the development of modern "Indian law," but in the decades that followed, tribes have continued to gain power in the Northwest by economic, diplomatic, and institutional means as much as or more through litigation.

At the heart of the Supreme Court's reasoning in Oliphant was an assertion that Indian tribes had never exercised authority over non-Indians in the past and that no treaty or federal law had expressed or assumed otherwise. Certainly there was evidence of a generation or two during which reservation life was almost completely dictated by federal employees—a tragic era that witnessed, among other humiliations, the systematic criminalization of traditional religious gatherings. But that was a century ago. Harmon focuses her narrative on the next phase of the story when, from the 1940s to the 1960s, tribes in Washington and elsewhere in the West were organizing, building institutions, and reasserting authority, leading, inevitably, to legal battles over the extent to which they had inherent rights to do so. Like all good historiography, the story is rich in people with big ideas and chutzpah who beat their heads against convention and established institutions. Harmon and I knew many of them. Reclaiming the Reservation gives them proper recognition as the yeast that gave western Washington tribes the confidence to reassert their cultural and political identities and reclaim collective power in the twentieth century. This work is a fitting sequel to Harmon's classic work on an earlier generation, Indians in the Making (1998).

Apart from its meticulous research, indeed, Reclaiming the Reservation should be read for its rich record of disagreement, even discord, within tribes as they found themselves at the crossroads of simply melting away or rebelling, especially during the Termination crisis in the 1950s. Northwest tribes largely operated under constitutions or charters drafted by federal government lawyers in the 1930s, and at the same time they were led by people whose grandparents had made names for themselves the old way and signed treaties. Wartime service, trade unions, Indian boarding schools, factory jobs (particularly around the Salish Sea) had profoundly influenced them and their parents. Communities were deeply divided over Termination, integration into the state, and undifferentiated citizenship, just as they would become deeply divided again in the 1980s by "federal recognition" and the contradictions among ancestry, family ties, tribal enrollment, and federal government efforts to subdivide the Coast Salish nation into a manageable number of small and fixed territorial polities. I recall one evening meeting when an "unrecognized" tribe I was counseling erupted into arguments over why they needed federal acknowledgment anyway. What good would it do them?

There is an old cliché that it's hard to be an Indian. It's made even harder by the hazards of navigating the best path through the absurd world of federal Indian law and policy. Good people do not always agree. Journalists and scholars do Indigenous peoples no favors by pretending that everyone sings the same song or drinks the same tea. The struggle against colonialism is also a struggle for internal solidarity and leadership in spite...