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anything else. In sum, this book is a marvelous accomplishment.
DAN FLORES
University of Montana
MAUREEN KON/U-E. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004.
Pp. viii, 367. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.
This comprehensive study of the written productions
of mid-nineteenth-century American Indian intellectuals and activists makes a significant and welcome
contribution to the growing body of scholarly work
dedicated to the retrieval of the more obscure of these
early writings and the revisioning of some of the more
familiar ones. Maureen Konkle's study is indebted to
the prior work of a number of other scholars who have
addressed Native intellectuals and intellectual traditions, including LaVonne Ruoff, Barry O'Connell,
Philip Deloria, and Robert Allen Warrior, but its
major debt is to Vine Deloria, Jr., whose insistent
focus on the continuing struggle for Native sovereignty
provides the conceptual grounding for Konkle's own
analysis of Native writing as a form of political negotiation and resistance.
The book's title suggests its primary argument. At
the heart of the mid-nineteenth-century writings,
Konkle argues, whether in the form of memoirs,
broadsides, Christian testimonials, memorials to Congress, or tribal histories, is the strategic aim of contesting white authority, both political and narrative,
and asserting Native sovereignty. She supports her
argument through a close reading of a wide variety of
texts by an array of writers that includes Elias Boudinot and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee); William Apess
(Pequot); Peter Jones and George Copway (Ojibwe);
and Ely and Nicholson Parker and David Cusick
(Seneca). Konkle reads each Native writer as responding specifically to the many ways in which white writers
and authorities attempted to deny political viability to
Indian persons and nations, especially by assuming the
kind of stance that would allow them to substitute
benevolence, sympathy, or vague admiration for serious engagement with the political issues that were of
paramount concern to the Native spokespersons. The
argument is energized by Konkle's response-often a
bristly one-to a pattern of previous readings that she
identifies as typical of both literary and cultural critics,
a pattern she sees as continuing the nineteenth-century
model of eliding Native political histories and issues.
The literary critics, she contends, have focused primarily on the psychological identities of individual writers,
the cultural critics have treated Indian nations as
cultural rather than political entities, arid both groups
have been paralyzed by their acceptance of the enduring stereotype of the Indian intellectual as bewilderingly trapped between two worlds.
The greatest strengths of this book are, first, its
refreshing insistence on seeing the Native intellectuals
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as canny political thinkers who were neither culturally
trapped by tribal tradition nor psychologically torn by
it, and second, its deep immersion in the historical
archive and in the relevant historical literature. Each
section of the text-on Cherokee resistance to removal, the career of Apess, Ojibwe historiography, and
Iroquois contestation of white land speculationmakes supple use of the available forms of documentation to construct relevant and compelling contexts
for the readings of individual texts. This attention to,
and respect for, the full range of documentary evidence sets Konkle's work apart from much (though
certainly not all) of the previous scholarship in more
compelling ways than do her frontal attacks on individual critics. Those attacks, in fact, often work to
open up questions about some of Konkle's own assumptions. When, for example, she writes that Copway's writing "dramatizes the inevitable epistemological struggle in Native writing in the wake of settlement
and colonization" (p. 222), it is not clear why that
statement is not finally just a more sophisticated way of
articulating the position of being "torn between two
cultures" (p. 290) that Konkle finds such a reductively
condescending description. Nor is it completely clear
why the argument insists on a distinction between
cultural and political motivations in examining the
work of both the Native writers and their critics.
Apess's motives are described, for example, as being
"better understood as economic, political, and intellectual rather than vaguely cultural" (p. 158), and
contemporary critics in general are criticized for having ignored Native political struggles in their valuing of
Native writing "for its expression of cultural difference
and therefore of native cultural identity" (p. 27).
Although Konkle's effort to resituate these nineteenth-century Native writers in the political contexts
from which they emerged is both important and welcome, it would be helpful if her analysis were more
attentive to the complex relationship between those
arenas of thought and action that she designates as the
political and the cultural and less intent on marking
them off as distinctive categories.
Lucy MADDOX
Georgetown University
JILL NORGREN. The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark
Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press. 2004. Pp. x, 212. $21.95.
In 1829, Cherokee leaders decided to seek the help of
the federal judiciary in their effort to defeat Georgia'S
campaign to absorb much of the Cherokee homeland.
The resulting Supreme Court cases-Cherokee Nation
v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832)formed a crucial part of the foundation of American
Indian law. Jill Norgren describes the context for the
Cherokees' legal challenge and examines Chief Justice
John Marshall's famous opinions. She describes the
essential ambiguity of the Court's rulings on the
subject of Indian rights, ambiguity that today still
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hinders the work of Native Americans seeking to
strengthen tribal sovereignty.
There are many accounts of Cherokee removal, but
most use the Supreme Court cases primarily to demonstrate the villainy of Georgia and the Jackson administration. Norgren does much more than that. She
offers succinct descriptions of the legal doctrines available to the Court in the Cherokee cases and clear
explanations of Marshall's opinions. She also places
the legal material within the context of Jacksonian
politics and the development of the Cherokee republic. The result is a highly useful guide to the early
history of United States Indian law.
Norgren sees the Marshall Court's approach to
Indian affairs as an effort to strike a balance between
territorial expansion and adherence to international
law. American citizens wanted Indian land; however,
tribal possessions could not simply be taken without
violating established Western legal traditions. America
needed to expand with some degree of legitimacy, and
that process required law that would acknowledge
Indian rights without obstructing too severely the
absorption of Indian land.
Fletcher v. Peck (1810), a case better known for its
influence on contract law, provides an early example.
Marshall's opinion stated that Indians possessed an
"occupancy" title to their lands, a weaker title than fee
simple. They should be allowed to use their territory as
they saw fit, but they did not own the land the way
Euro-Americans owned their farms. The United States
or an individual state was the ultimate owner, an idea
that fit well the common American assumption that
"civilized" whites had a stronger claim on land than
did "savage" Indians.
In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, Marshall established
a similarly restricted definition of tribal sovereignty,
describing Indian tribes as "domestic dependent nations." Native Americans had the right to govern their
own internal affairs, he suggested, but they did not
belong to fully sovereign nations. Rather they existed
in a "state of pupilage" to the United States. As
Norgren explains, this definition was a legal "sleight of
hand" (p. 102). The Cherokees had asked the Court
for an injunction preventing enforcement of Georgia's
harassing laws on the grounds that the Cherokees
constituted a foreign nation. With his decision that
tribes were "domestic dependent nations," Marshall
was able to reject the Cherokees' request and avoid a
showdown with the Jackson administration or the
state. Native Americans, however, have had to live
with this odd half-acknowledgement of their political
rights ever since.
In Worcester v. Georgia, Marshall's opinion endorsed
Cherokee sovereignty in much stronger terms. Marshall dismissed all of Georgia's anti-Cherokee laws as
unconstitutional, not simply the law under which the
missionaries Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler had
been imprisoned. He affirmed the Cherokees' treaties
and their right to self-government. As Norgren points
out, however, Marshall continued to refrain from
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designating the Cherokee Nation as fully sovereign.
The Cherokee republic was still something short of a
political equal to the United States. Of course, even
"domestic dependent nations" were too much of an
obstacle to expansion for Jackson and Georgia.
In Norgren's account, the Marshall Court's Indian
affairs rulings amount to a fascinating failure. Marshall
proved unable to balance law and land hunger. Moreover, as Norgren ably demonstrates, Marshall's efforts
to find that balance led him to twist international law
and misrepresent the history of Indian-white relations.
His opinions neither persuaded expansionist Americans nor offered a clear-cut endorsement of tribal
sovereignty. While the Worcester decision proved useful to later generations of Native Americans laboring
to defend Indian rights, thanks to Marshall's indistinct
language it has been "both a lifeline and a hollow
hope" (p. 153). This book is a reprint edition of a 1996
McGraw-Hill volume. Historians should be grateful to
the Oklahoma University Press for reissuing the book,
for it is the best short treatment available of this vital
episode.
ANDREW DENSON
Western Carolina University
TANIS C. THORNE. The World's Richest Indian: The
Scandal over Jackson Barnett's Oil Fortune. New York:
Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 292. $35.00.
For a book offering a small slice of American Indian
history, Tanis C. Thorne's narrative contributes significantly to a better understanding of lingering issues for
Native Americans. Thanks to two 1830s U.S. Supreme
Court decisions, the federal government assumed a
trust responsibility to protect Indian legal rights as
sovereign but dependent nations. The responsibility
extended to individuals whose shares from accumulated tribal funds rest in federal trust accounts. Although this trust relationship has been modified over
time, it has not disappeared; indeed, this special
relationship between federal power and Indian persons has erupted into a major and continuing scandal
in the 1990s, involving the neglect and misuse of trust
accounts of over 300,000 Native Americans.
In the 1800s, an increasing number of oil companies
underwrote the costs of drilling test wells on reservation land in Indian Territory. These yielded samples of
high-grade petroleum that required only minimum
refining and allowed cheap extraction as the oil composed vast pools located at shallow depths. Development of oil fields that would eventually produce enormous profits was initially slow but burgeoned during
and after World War I. With the exceptions of the
Osage and Kansa tribes, which retained their mineral
rights tribally and shared benefits equally among all
members, Indians receiving individual allotments by
1907 might become extraordinarily rich from royalty
payments if their land covered part of an oil pool.
Jackson Barnett, who was born in 1856 and died in
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