Review by Booklist Review
Hoxie author, professor, and trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian focuses on Native American figures who, for the last 200 years, have sought to define a place for Native communities within the institutions of the U.S. He begins with James McDonald, the first Indian lawyer, who, in the 1820s, was the first Native activist to make the case for Indian rights directly to American political leaders. One of his successors, William Potter Ross, testified before Congress and was an active defender of American Indian nationalism until his death, in 1891. Sarah Winnemucca was a Paiute author and activist who wrote forcefully about the western expansion into her homeland. Hoxie examines in meticulous detail the successful 20-year Ojibwe struggle to stay on their land at Mille Lac, Minnesota, and the 1911 formation of the Society of American Indians, whose founders focused on the extension of American citizenship to all Native peoples. He concludes this enlightening volume, the latest in the Penguin History of American Life, with Vine Deloria, who encouraged re-tribalization the return of young educated Indians from cities back to their tribes.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
From the early 19th through the late 20th century, U.S. policy toward Native Americans unfolded in three stages: wars and often violent removal from the east to the west; concentration in reservations and the attempt to "civilize" "an inferior and dependent race"; and the granting of only limited tribal self-governance. University of Illinois historian Hoxie (Talking Back to Civilization) profiles eight Native American lawyers, lobbyists, writers, and politicians who "chose to oppose the oppressions of the United States with words and ideas rather than violence." Mid-19th-century leader William Potter Ross, the son of a Scottish father and Cherokee mother, was a Princeton graduate who negotiated with the Union Pacific Railroad over its claims to tribal lands, and insisted on tribal legal autonomy. The writings of late-19th-century Paiute polemicist Sarah Winnemucca sharply challenged the paternalistic policies of "the Indian office and its ideology of progress." Hoxie's best chapter is on the Sioux lawyer and writer Vine Deloria Jr., who wrote that Native Americans should see themselves as "American Indians" not as assimilated "Indian Americans" and argued that U.S. policies should forward Indian self-governance. This is an important, well-written, and thoroughly documented work about Native American leaders, who, while lesser known, are no less important. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A noted student of American Indian life profiles activists who sought to lead their people from subjugation to citizenship. Take Sarah Winnemucca, for instance, a 19th-century Paiute teacher and writer who argued that the only way to end the suffering of Native peoples was to give them "a permanent home on [the Indians'] own native soil," which would make of "the savage (as he is called today)a thrifty and law-abiding member of the community." Her protests against official corruption and indifference earned her notoriety among sympathetic whites, mostly on the East Coast, but she was attacked as a radical if not a puppet of the military, which was conspiring to wrest control of the Indian agency away from civilian authority. Hoxie's (History and Law/Univ. of Illinois; Talking Back To Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era, 2001, etc.) narrative opens in the closing years of the Revolution, when Choctaw leader James McDonald, "the first Indian in the United States to be trained as a lawyer," foresaw trouble for his people with the collapse of British rule; it closes with another lawyer, Vine Deloria, who made a careful distinction between American Indians and Indian Americans and argued against the social Darwinism hidden within social science: "By expecting that real Indians should conform to a specific list of backward traits and live as folk people,' anthropologists, and their missionary colleagues, convinced themselves that helping Indians required changing or even eradicating their cultures." In between, Hoxie considers the work of the Salish scholar D'Arcy McNickle, the carefully litigious Mille Lacs Ojibwe band, the Seneca activist Alice Jemison and other activists who, working with, yes, anthropologists and missionaries and particularly lawyers, helped pave the way for a time in which " they' were now our' neighbors, employers, customers, and fellow citizens." A capable, engaging work of history, important for students of official relations between the U.S. government and the Native peoples under its rule.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
