Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-9q27g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T13:31:48.340Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Post-Colonial Studies of Native America. A Review Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2017

Crisca Bierwert
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Extract

Twenty years ago a work entitled The Nations Within examined the political structures that keep Native polities embedded within the United States, and the legal armature that sovereignty principles might provide for future activism (Deloria and Lytle 1984). The Native nations are still “within,” in the political sense, but they are “out” in public discourses; activism has given sovereignty claims more standing that all but dreamers would have imagined in 1984. During the same period, however, federal Indian policies have alternatively buttressed and undercut the power of tribal leadership, just as they have on other continents where imperial powers have cultivated “Native authorities.” Such destabilizing shifts impel scholars of Native political, economic, and cultural histories to examine less visible violence and inequalities that underlie political institutions, particularly those that remain as evident constructions of power change.

Type
Thomas Biolsi, “Deadliest Enemies”: Law and the Making of Race Relations On and Off Rosebud Reservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
Copyright
© 2004 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bierwert Crisca 1999 Brushed by Cedar, Living by the River: Coast Salish Figures of Power Tucson University of Arizona Press
Buckley Thomas 2002 Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990 Berkeley University of California Press
Deloria Philip J. 1998 Playing Indian New Haven Yale University Press
Deloria Vine Jr. Lytle Clifford M. 1984 The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty New York Pantheon Books
Dowd Gregory 2002 War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press
Lomawaima Tsianina 1994 They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School Lincoln University of Nebraska Press
Mihesuah Devon 2003 Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism Lincoln University of Nebraska Press
O'Brien Jean 1997 Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press
Plane Ann Marie 2000 Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England Ithaca, N.Y. Cornell University Press
Scheckel Susan 1998 The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press
Strong Pauline Turner 1999 Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives Boulder, Colo. Westview Press
Wilkins David E. 1997 American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice Austin University of Texas Press