Review: New Perspectives on Native North America

New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations #

By Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, eds.

University of Nebraska Press, 2006

Kan, Sergei A., and Pauline Turner Strong, eds. New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. ISBN 9781496245328.

The festschrift is a genre of obligation. Students gather, the honoree is toasted, and the resulting volume sits on a shelf as a monument rather than a resource. While this collection does not escape the genre entirely, I will argue that it does considerably better than the genre requires, and that the way to read it is not as a tribute but as a field report on a particular way of doing Native North American studies. Kan and Strong assemble nineteen essays for Raymond D. Fogelson, most first aired at the 1996 American Anthropological Association meeting, and the volume repays the reader who approaches it as a map of a research tradition (the Chicago Americanist lineage) rather than as a book with a single destination.

A lineage rather than a thesis #

The organizing claim is genealogical. Fogelson trained at Pennsylvania under A. Irving Hallowell and A. F. C. Wallace, inheriting a line that runs back through Frank Speck and Edward Sapir, and he carried that Americanist synthesis of psychology, ethnography, and history into four decades at the University of Chicago. The volume's four parts (Perspectives, Cultures, Histories, and Representations) trace how that inheritance passes down and mutates. The editors' introduction argues that this tradition matters precisely because it refused the split between cultural anthropology and history that hardened elsewhere in the discipline.

The argument is real, but it belongs to the editors, not to the contributors. Shared training, rather than a common problem, holds the essays together. Readers who want a book that builds toward a conclusion will leave frustrated; readers who want to watch a research tradition at work, across four centuries and a continent, will get considerably more.

Concepts under load #

The best chapters test Fogelson's own analytical vocabulary. His notions of ethno-ethnohistory, epitomizing events, and the ethnohistory of nonevents have circulated widely enough to become shorthand, and here they get put to work rather than merely cited. Margaret Bender's treatment of Cherokee ethnoliteracy and the Sequoyah story shows how a syllabary becomes an object of cultural theorizing for the people who use it. Larry Nesper's account of the Lac du Flambeau treaty-rights conflict demonstrates the practical stakes of arguing about continuity, since claims to cultural persistence carry legal weight in Wisconsin courtrooms. Jeffrey Anderson reads Arapaho Ghost Dance songs as poetic systems rather than as evidence of deprivation, which quietly corrects a long tradition of treating revitalization movements as symptoms.

Two contributions stand out for method. Raymond DeMallie's work on Sioux ethnohistory models what it means to read documentary and oral sources against each other without privileging either by default. Raymond Bucko's essay on humor in the Lakota sweat lodge takes seriously something ethnographers routinely notice and rarely analyze. On the representational side, Jean O'Brien dismantles the New England machinery of Indian disappearance, and Frederic Gleach traces how Pocahontas became infinitely reusable (an icon that takes on a life of its own). Sergei Kan's own chapter on Tlingit experience across Russian and American colonial regimes reminds us that the northern Pacific offers a comparative case that Southeastern-focused scholarship keeps underusing.

Where the volume shows its age #

The lag between the 1996 panel and the 2006 publication is visible. The intervening decade saw the decolonizing-methodologies argument reshape the field, and this book largely predates that conversation rather than engaging it. Fogelson's tradition centered Native categories of history and personhood, which was genuinely oppositional in the 1970s, but the volume rarely asks who is authorized to produce those accounts. Native scholars and communities appear here mostly as subjects of study and as sources, less often as theorists whose work the contributors must answer to. This silence is a limitation of the tradition being honored, and an honest festschrift might have named it more directly.

The unevenness is the ordinary cost of the form. Some essays arrive compact and finished; others read like conference papers that never got the second revision. Peter Nabokov's afterword gestures toward synthesis but cannot supply what a conclusion would have provided, and the Fogelson bibliography that closes the book is useful for historians of anthropology and inert for anyone else. The Cherokee and Plains material runs thick, the Southwest and Arctic thin, so the geographic coverage promised by the title is more aspirational than actual.

Verdict #

Judge this book by what it can do rather than by what it claims. As an argument about Native North America it scatters; as a map of the Chicago psychological-anthropology lineage and its ethnohistorical offspring, it is the single most useful volume available, and several of its essays have outlived the occasion that produced them. Graduate students in ethnohistory should read the Bender, DeMallie, O'Brien, and Nesper chapters and mine the rest selectively. Historians of anthropology should read the whole thing, since the book is itself a primary source on how a school reproduces itself. Anyone looking for a survey of contemporary Indigenous Studies should look elsewhere; this volume is a disciplinary family album (a good one), not the introduction its title implies.