Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2004
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 133-34.
Abstract
Cherokee sociologist Eva Garroutte has fashioned a genuine contribution to the study of the American Indian in the United States. Herself a mixed-race person of Caucasian and Indian heritage, she focuses on the always troublesome and often controversial issue of Indian identity, one that pervades the consciousness of all Native Americans, and not a few non-Native folks. Her straightforward narrative is informed by published and unpublished sources in law, history, social science, and literature and enhanced by numerous in-depth interviews with Indian and non-Indian people. What results constitutes the single comprehensive book-length examination of "Indian-ness" in print.
Great Plains tribal and individual examples are included throughout the volume to help illustrate the historical and contemporary problem of deciding exactly who is and, as importantly, who is not identifiable as Indian. Garroutte offers a fascinating congeries of attempts to resolve this elusive issue. The federal government through administrative fiat, court decisions, and legislation has struggled valiantly to provide an immutable standard, but has only succeeded in dispensing confusing· and contradictory dictums. Each tribe across the nation has weighed in with a particularistic definition of Indian identity, inextricably tied to tribal membership, but this has done little beyond reflecting Native peoples' dissatisfaction with endless measuring and assessments of blood quantums and cultural attributes.
Refreshingly, Garroutte steps outside and around most scholars and others who have participated in the continuing discourse on Indian-ness by adopting a new paradigm-radical indigenism. As she deftly explains, radical indigenism presumes the efficacy of uniquely Indian approaches and models in pursuing questions of identity. She argues that established academic disciplines will likely fall a bit short in the search for satisfactory explanations unless they recognize the worth of alternative modes of research and analysis. Her commonsensical assertion seems to me eminently reasonable, and "radical" only in not being previously accepted.
Comments
Copyright 2004 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln