http://www.historycoop.org/journals/jah/89.2/br_91.html

From the <"The Journal of American History"> Vol. 89, Issue 2.

Presented online in association with the History Cooperative. http://www.historycooperative.org

Book Review

Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912–1954. By Paul C. Rosier. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. xviii, 346 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-8032-3941-6.)

Paul C. Rosier's portrait of the Blackfeet people during the turbulent years from 1912 to 1954 is based upon archival research, government documents, interviews with selected individuals, and an appropriate secondary literature. Not a book for the fainthearted, this thick description nevertheless makes an important contribution to our understanding of how this group of American Indians responded to federal policies and sought to shape them to their benefit. A great strength of Rosier's study is his reconstruction of the way Blackfeet people struggled to construct their identity and to understand what "sovereignty" might mean in the twentieth century. Emerging from the nineteenth century, the Blackfeet had a greatly altered population: "In 1885 only 18 mixed-bloods lived among roughly 2,000 full-bloods. In 1914, 1,189 full-bloods

lived among 1,452 mixed-bloods."

1

These ethnic and emerging class divisions were expressed and modulated by interactions between the Blackfeet and federal innovations such as the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. As a consequence of accepting this legislation, the Blackfeet became a legally incorporated entity and adopted a constitution that would govern their internal and external relations with the wider society. The Blackfeet Tribal Business Council emerged as an institutional locus of people's struggle for identity and nationhood. The cultural and economic divisions between full- and mixed-bloods, the sometimes paralyzing factionalism, and the instances of mismanagement and occasional corruption on the part of both white and Indian officials are richly described in the text. This analysis shows clearly how the Blackfeet people struggled to redefine their identity in order to establish their independence without giving in to the wider societal pressures for total assimilation. Clearly they could not return to the pre-reservation past, but they could and did try to work out what it might mean to be and remain Indians in the twentieth century.

2

As it stands, Rosier's book is written for an audience of professional historians and students of Indian history. Those interested in the development of democratic institutions will also find this study useful. The book could have included a sense of the wider context of the nineteenth century as well as the longer history of the Blackfeet. If readers miss a critical footnote, they would not know that the Blackfeet in the United States have Canadian kin, the Bloods, North Piegans, and Siksikas of Alberta. They would not know at all that a large band of Blackfeet, the Small Robes, were exterminated by disease and warfare in the nineteenth century. They could not entertain the question of how Canadian

Indian policy compared with United States policies toward American Indians. Finally, full-blood memories and cultural practices are muted in the description. Their responses to policies initiated in the early twentieth century would have been more understandable had greater detail been provided in an extended introduction. Despite these caveats, Rosier's book provides the kind of microscopic analysis needed to understand the responses of Indian people as they reconstructed their individual and social identities in the twentieth century.

Howard L. Harrod

Vanderbilt University

Nashville, Tennessee

©2002 Organization of American Historians