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Ted Binnema, Frank Rzeczkowski. Uniting the Tribes: The Rise and Fall of Pan-Indian Community on the Crow Reservation., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1533–1534, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1533
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Extract
Anyone interested in the history of internal politics on Indian reservations and pan-Indian (or pan-indigenous) movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States (or elsewhere) ought to consult this important new book. Uniting the Tribes is focused on the Crow peoples (with noteworthy attention paid to Crow-Blackfeet and Crow-Lakota relations), but its implications extend far beyond the Crows. If Frank Rzeczkowski is correct, his book may be key to achieving a better understanding of the political history of many nomadic indigenous hunting-and-gathering societies before and after they moved to reservations and reserves.
Rzeczkowski explores the subtleties of intraethnic and interethnic (including pan-Indian) identities from the turn of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. His argument is that, contrary to widespread assumptions about the nature of “tribes,” the heterogeneous, fluid, and flexible attributes of nomadic hunting-and-gathering societies such as the Crows equipped those societies to foster interethnic affiliations quite well. Furthermore, the changing realities of the late pre-reservation and early reservation eras encouraged inclusive heterogeneous identities, and pan-Indianism. In the late pre-reservation period, these changing circumstances included the growing perception among Indian communities that the American government posed a greater threat than neighboring Indian peoples did. In the early reservation period they included the end of wars between Indian communities, the growing threat of government policies, and easier communication by rail and mail. The “politics of visiting,” and the arrival of non-Crow people (Cheyennes and Crees) to the Crow Reservation to take advantage of economic opportunities, rendered the Crow Reservation a multiethnic place during the late nineteenth century. This multiethnic reality helps explain the evolution of Crow cultural and religious practices at the time.
