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Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific Northwest's
Columbia River Indians -- the defiant River People whose ancestors
refused to settle on the reservations established for them in central
Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional accounts of
tribal dispossession and confinement, their story illuminates the
persistence of off-reservation Native communities and the fluidity of
their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light of federal
policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering presence
of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes down the
difficult path marked out by the forces of American colonization.
Based
on more than a decade of archival research and conversations with
Native people, Andrew Fisher's groundbreaking book traces the waxing and
waning of Columbia River Indian identity from the mid-nineteenth
through the late twentieth centuries. Fisher explains how, despite
policies designed to destroy them, the shared experience of being off
the reservation and at odds with recognized tribes forged far-flung
river communities into a loose confederation called the Columbia River
Tribe. Environmental changes and political pressures eroded their
autonomy during the second half of the twentieth century, yet many River
People continued to honor a common heritage of ancestral connection to
the Columbia, resistance to the reservation system, devotion to cultural
traditions, and detachment from the institutions of federal control and
tribal governance. At times, their independent and uncompromising
attitude has challenged the sovereignty of the recognized tribes,
earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as radicals and
troublemakers even among their own people.
Shadow Tribe is part
of a new wave of historical scholarship that shows Native American
identities to be socially constructed, layered, and contested rather
than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his vantage point on the
Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study that uses regional
history to broaden our understanding of how Indians thwarted efforts to
confine and define their existence within narrow reservation boundaries.
Andrew
H. Fisher is associate professor of history at the College of William
and Mary.
"This splendid book deserves a wide audience. In
exceptionally graceful prose, Andrew Fisher adds an absorbing, important
story to the emergent scholarship on American Indian identity. His
account of Columbia River Indians' long resistance to their displacement
and political redefinition is frank and sensitive, wise and sometimes
wry. Shadow Tribe not only fills a crucial void in the
literature on Pacific Northwest history; it offers valuable lessons for
all scholars of Indian and ethnic history." -Alexandra Harmon,
University of Washington
"Andrew Fisher has written a superb book
that tells a story of near-forgotten Indians who refused to move to the
reservations and continued to live a traditional life along their
beloved Columbia River. The dramatic story of their survival from the
nineteenth deep into the twentieth centuries is a moving narrative that
is both authentic and colorful." -Clifford Trafzer, University of
California Riverside
"Shadow Tribe focuses on Indian communities
that remained and evolved within important historic areas not on the
reservations, in which the communities' complicated relationship with
the Indian peoples on the reservations is as much a part of the story as
the engagement with non-Indian society outside of the reservations." -John Shurts, author of Indian Reserved Water Rights
"In this
finely crafted book, Andrew Fisher provides a richly textured history of
the making of a distinct identity among Indians of the Columbia River.
By revealing the limits of 'tribal' histories and uncovering the
complexities of identify formation, Fisher makes a signal contribution
to American Indian studies. A work of impeccable research and analysis,
Shadow Tribe is also an eloquently told story of heroic persistence in
the face of tragedy and loss." -Jeff Ostler, University of Oregon
"Andrew
Fisher's fine book asks us to reconsider the particular places and
symbolic spaces in which American Indians of the Pacific Northwest have
sustained their cultural identity and legal rights independent of
reservation-based political authority. Though focused on the compelling
story of Columbia River Indians' struggles of community maintenance,
this important study will benefit all scholars of American Indian
history and ethnic studies." -Paul C. Rosier, author of Serving Their
Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth
Century
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