Review by Choice Review
Foley, who holds appointments in anthropology and education (Univ. of Texas), has ostensibly written a work that explores the borderland of encounter between the white and Mesquakis (Fox) communities of Tama, Iowa. This work is not so much another ethnography as it is an inquiry into how ethnic boundaries (with the author's obligatory nod to poststructuralism) are created through narrative misrecognition, and how occasionally, if one is lucky enough to be born into either community, one can go home again and write a memoir. "Not being a 'Native American specialist,'" Foley rightly admits, "I have neither read many books on Indians nor heard many Indian jokes about anthropologists." Growing up in Tama, he is nevertheless a skilled enough ethnographer to offer a number of insights into contemporary Mesquaki life. These are leavened with ruminations, occasionally wickedly funny, of an aging academic "Boomer" at war with his discipline and the remembered fire and idealism of youth, who has surrendered to the rather conventional pose of sneering at liberals everywhere. It can be read as a companion to Fred McTaggart's Wolf That I Am (1976) and Ray A. Young Bear's Black Eagle Child (CH, Oct'92). General readers, upper-division undergraduates, and above. L. G. Moses Oklahoma State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
