Middleton, Beth Rose

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REVIEWS 177indigenous feminism. It also would have been useful had the author referenced how much Zitkala-!a fought for long-held cultural norms within many American Indian communities—not new ideas in her time. While white women of the Victorian era were fighting to be recognized as equal to their male counterparts, Native women in many American Indian communities held positions of great respect that exceeded the concept of mere equality. While I do not want to downplay the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, gender justice also resides in longstanding cultural norms of many indigenous communities."e limited reference to indigenous feminist theory does not detract from the author’s argument that Zitkala-!a was a forerunner of Red Power. It shows her as one of the few early indigenous feminists who addressed colonial settler injustices at the local and personal level, as well as on a larger scale at the national level. She fought with every available tool including literature, art, politics, religious groups, and women’s groups, to name a few. Her masterful writing informed audiences about how to work to change oppressive US government policies towards “Indian wards.” Her creation of a play to reach other potential sympathizers is an excellent example of indigenous feminism in action. Her composition of the Sun Dance Opera was a mix of her Yankton Sioux heritage songs and melodies blended with western classical music, creating the first-of-its-kind opera around a Sioux religious ceremony.I recommend this book because it tells an important story of early indigenous feminism as some Native women have defined and debated it (for further reading on indigenous feminism, see the work of Joyce Green, Devon Mihesuah, and Joanne Barker). Indigenous women inside and outside the academy are strong, powerful, and deeply rooted in their cultures. "ey work hard on contemporary issues and are willing to fight for their people and their cultures. Native women’s cultural and political power is easily seen in the Idle No More movement and the fight at Standing Rock. Indigenous women rise to protect land, water, their peoples, and all our relations from continued violations from corporations and government exploitation. Zitkala-!a lived such a life.Paulette L. BlanchardUniversity of KansasReservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. By Raymond I. Orr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 256 pages. $34.95 cloth.What factors influence tribal political behavior and decision-making? Why do some tribes have more or less conflict than other tribes? How is that conflict expressed? How might these di#erences be explained through an examination of tribal history and responses to that history? In his admittedly uncomfortable examination of the practices and roots of intratribal politics and conflict, Raymond Orr brings socio-psychological theory on intergenerational trauma to bear on political analysis. By AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL 41:2 (2017) 178 à à àfocusing on intra-ethnic rather than inter-ethnic conflict, Orr explicitly ventures into fractious terrain that many scholars would rather avoid. He confronts the academic aversion to studies of intratribal politics, arguing that not studying these dynamics “ignores the contemporary lived experience of American Indians” (27) and disadvan-tages the field of American Indian politics. He notes further that political science is full of research on conflict in nontribal contexts and that we certainly know that conflict is present in tribal politics, and asks scholars to consider why the barriers to writing about conflict in Indian country are so significant. Indeed, he argues, tribes are not “so fragile” that to examine internal conflicts would “damage political units . . . that have survived cultural, social, biological, and spiritual catastrophes during five hundred years of colonization” (40). He asserts that it is the experience of trauma itself and how tribal members respond to it that is foundational to tribal political behavior.Orr presents three case studies of political behavior and conflict among the Citizen Potawatomi (of which he is a member), Isleta Pueblo, and Rosebud Sioux tribes, respectively. He compares these three very di#erent contexts along axes of three broad motivational frames—self-interest, melancholia, and communal a#ect. As visualized in a Polanyian triad, these three frames interact with one another and are influenced by the presence or absence of trauma and wealth. He utilizes this logic to assert, for example, that for the Citizen Potawatomis—who have a painful history of removal to Oklahoma and have experienced some uneven economic success based on their relationship to oil and other assets—communal a#ect has been eroded, and the two principal factions are characterized by either self-interest or melan-cholia. Drawing on this same logic, he argues that for the Lakota at Rosebud, the lack of economic success and the high degree of historic trauma create high levels of individual and collective melancholia, leading to political decisions that increase contemporary trauma. Finally, at Isleta Pueblo, he posits that the lack of traumatic removal and strong cultural continuity lead to a heightened communal a#ect that depresses self-interest and melancholia. Orr acknowledges that his model is highly simplistic, but argues that as a social scientist, he is tasked with making order out of complexity, and this work is but one attempt to understand the complexities of tribal political behavior.Orr invokes at least two significant geographical metaphors that are central to his analysis and may be highly applicable to other work. As he discusses the discomfort of studying intra-ethnic rather than inter-ethnic conflict, he asserts a “geography of exploi-tation”: a spatial metaphor for the distance between the perpetrator and the victim. Studying such a geography gets increasingly painful as the distance narrows; hence, the discomfort of describing self-inflicted or intrafamilial violence is comparatively greater than when examining violence between ethnic groups. Secondly, he describes his work in three very di#erent political contexts as an archipelagic approach—working with peoples and polities that might be considered as “distinct islands, but . . . still islands of the same chain” (200). As such, he attempts to create a framework that allows comparison across divergent locations in Indian country.REVIEWS 179For Orr, the lack of attention to trauma as an explanatory variable for tribal politics has stunted research with tribes. He argues that pain and loss are central to indigenous experiences and thus central to creating worldviews, identities, and political culture. "e presence or absence of trauma and the type of trauma (removal, conquest, forced conversion, etc.) shape the type and intensity of social and political conflict and result in di#erent outcomes within tribes. While scholars such as Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt of the Harvard Project of American Indian Economic Development have compared tribal economic development outcomes and recognized the importance of well-functioning tribal institutions in creating the conditions for successful tribal economic development (“Where Does Economic Development Really Come From?” 1995), they do not delve into the trauma literature in their explanation of why some tribal economic development projects fare better than others. In the trauma litera-ture, there is much focus on how communities exhibit post-traumatic stress disorder from historically traumatic experiences (see Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, “"e American Indian Holocaust,” 1998, for example), but this is not linked to tribal political behavior. In contrast, Orr strives to link trauma directly to collective political behavior and to show the ways in which it shapes worldviews and a#ects the decisions tribes make about economic development.Orr’s personal discussion of his own anxiety in addressing these uncomfortable but necessary topics in Indian country will likely generate lively discussions among students and faculty wrestling with research ethics and insider-outsider positionality (see Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999). However, while Orr advocates for placing the study of American Indian politics back in Indian communities, his theoretical framework draws principally from European scholars of politics, anthro-pology, psychology, philosophy, and sociology that include Karl Polanyi, Sigmund Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Friedrich Nietzsche. More attention to Native and indigenous theorists, particularly theorists from the communities of focus, might strengthen the text’s engagement with indigenous worldviews, rather than subjecting indigenous contexts to European-derived forms of analysis. Finally, while Orr often references the results of his interviews with informants from each community, the reader is never treated to a list of the questions he asked, making it di$cult to get a sense of his approach to community members and his specific topics of discus-sion with them.Orr takes risks in this text by consciously tackling the challenging and under-studied topic of how intergenerational trauma impacts intratribal politics. While his overt simplifications to identify worldviews and explain responses to trauma and resulting political behavior may give readers pause, Orr’s intervention to bring trauma studies into the study of American Indian polities is strikingly worthwhile. While much scholarship has looked at the character of trauma in indigenous communities and attendant coping mechanisms, Orr argues convincingly that considerations of trauma and its e#ects must be central to indigenous political analysis.Beth Rose MiddletonUniversity of California, Davis

Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. By Raymond I. Orr.

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