Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States

 OHQ vol. 115, no. 4 issue-specificity, demonstrating again how environmental problems always occupy multiple spaces. Adam Sowards University of Idaho RECOGNITION, SOVEREIGNTY STRUGGLES, AND INDIGENOUS RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES: A SOURCEBOOK edited by Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2013. Notes, index. 376 pages. $26.95 paper. The editors of this book, Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean M. O’Brien, intend“to bring together new scholarly analyses of the historical, cultural , and politico-legal facts of these ongoing struggles [for federal recognition of Indian tribal groups] to shed much-needed light on what they mean to the tribal nations and communities involved.” They want readers to “understand why recognition matters” (p. 5). DenOudenandO’Brien“focusonthehistorical and contemporary struggles of ‘unrecognized tribes’”toillustratethisintention(p.9).Authors of the various essays in the book present case studies and analyses of Native American communities that lack the protections — and to some extent, the disadvantages — of having legally recognized political status within the United States’ system of federal recognition, which provides “nation to nation” relationships between tribal governments and the U.S government.Theessaysinthisbookexplorethe issues of individual and community tribal and indigenous identity within the United States and raise important questions about who may determine the answers to these questions, and how, and why. There is serious debate, especially in the wake of the United Nations Declaration on the Rightsof IndigenousPeoples(undrip),regarding just how advantageous it is to have formally established government-to-government relationships between tribal groups and the United States. Different communities attach different meanings to such a relationship. In their essay on the Ramapough Mountain Indians,Angela E. Gonzales and Timothy Q. Evans, define three key advantages for federally recognized tribes: access to a broader variety of federal programs established for Indian tribes; the opportunity for economic development and protections on lands held in trust by the federal government; and “an opportunity for social justice and restitution” (p. 42). In her essay on the controversies regarding Native Hawaiians’ struggle for sovereignty, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui argues, however, that federal recognition on a level commensurate with Indian tribal recognition “would allow for no more than a domestic dependent entity under the full and exclusive plenary power of Congress,” and would thus severely limit Native Hawaiian independence (p. 325). The book is organized into three sections with four chapters in each and includes an introduction by the editors and an afterword by distinguishedNativeAmericanscholarDavidE. Part two, “State and Federal Recognition in New England,” includes essays focusing on federal recognition efforts, opposition from state government to tribal recognition applications , recognitions that were granted and then taken away, and outsider perceptions of Indian identity and what defines Indian com-  Reviews munities. Taken together, the essays provide a broad-ranging case study of a region still populated by people of Native descent and of Native communities that are often still viewed as outside of Indian country. Part three is titled“Contemporary Recognition Controversies,” although several essays in the first two parts of the book also cover this topic. Kathleen A. Brown-Perez writes about the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin that became mired in a bureaucratic nightmare over the interpretation of an 1839 law. The law was used in the twenty-first century to scrap the Brothertown’s efforts at recognition through the Department of the Interior, but at the same time thwarted them from using the congressional route to achieve recognition . Essays on the Chinook in the Northwest and the Muwekma Ohlones in San Francisco demonstrate how Indian people in the West also can be erased from landscapes and from American perceptions of who Indians are, where they live, how they relate to the broader American society, and under what conditions. Kauanui’s

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