Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation, and: Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance to Termination, 1950–59 (review)

The two texts examined in this review do not necessarily share a common optimistic view of Indian–White relations in South Dakota, but they do seem to suggest that we need to move away from global narratives and focus on tribal ones if we are to understand the perennial nature of Indian–White conflict. Dr. Thomas Biolsi, a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, tells us in his introduction to the new edition of Deadliest Enemies that one of the reasons he wrote the book was to answer his own question: "how has the collective bad faith of white people toward Native Americans been sustained, even institutionalized?" The desire on the part of this scholar suggests that his work is meant to be reviewed in the context of what is now called Postcoloniality, ambiguous as that term has proven to be. Inaugurating a progressive kind of Indian–White history, then, Biolosi identifies an 1886 Supreme Court opinion in the title of his study as today's central political conflict and utilizes a seven-month academic leave spent at the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota as the major research field for interviews and data gathering.

In his introduction, Biolsi says this study revealed to him that "it is not that whites in South Dakota are racially innocent or that they are not beneficiaries of white privilege. Rather, the point is that they are no more racist and no more beneficiaries of white privilege at the expense of Indian people than other whites in the United States" (xvi). This may be a controversial observation and an unsubstantiated finding, since there is a lot of evidence (not entirely anecdotal) that whites who live close to or on Indian reservations are more unlikely to think well of them than those who have no contact or little contact with them. While it is probably true that knowledge of Sioux Indians can never be innocent or "objective" because it is lived and produced by human beings who are necessarily embedded in colonial history and relationships, this benign observation by Biolsi is very likely not universally shared by his subjects.

Biolsi's assessment may also come as a surprise to Professor Edward Charles Valandra, a Sicangu Lakota scholar, who has mulled over the same question and has written on the same subject in a text titled Not Without Our Consent, (University of Illinois Press, 2006). In an early review of Valandra's book (November 6, Lakota/Dakota Journal, Rapid City, S. Dak.), I argue otherwise on Valandra's behalf and probably contradict Biolsi's assessment by saying this: Valandra records with relentless precision the racism that is at the heart of Indian–White relations in the state of South Dakota and documents the strategies of all white legislatures, both state and federal, in their efforts to not just weaken tribal power but to do away with it entirely during one of the most perilous periods of Indian History in the twentieth century, i.e., the Termination and Relocation Era (1950–1960).

Unlike Biolsi, Valandra names and talks openly of congressional "genocide-tainted legislative acts" (103), as dubious regional white-power efforts to encourage South Dakota whites, particularly in previous eras, to buy up Indian allotments creating a "checker-boarded" land scheme that has promulgated political strife for a hundred years. It is doubtful whether or not postcoloniality can be situated in any Indian–White history without a thorough and critical examination of land acquisition by whites in the region in question. Such examination is what Valandra, recognizing that reality, does when he chronicles what is sometimes called "that other history," "the Wounded Knee Masssacre," "the confiscation of Lakota homelands and the inability of South Dakotans to perceive...