Twenty years ago a work entitled The Nations Within examined the political structures that keep Native polities embedded within the United States, and the legal armature that sovereignty principles might provide for future activism (Deloria and Lytle 1984). The Native nations are still “within,” in the political sense, but they are “out” in public discourses; activism has given sovereignty claims more standing that all but dreamers would have imagined in 1984. During the same period, however, federal Indian policies have alternatively buttressed and undercut the power of tribal leadership, just as they have on other continents where imperial powers have cultivated “Native authorities.” Such destabilizing shifts impel scholars of Native political, economic, and cultural histories to examine less visible violence and inequalities that underlie political institutions, particularly those that remain as evident constructions of power change.

Two recent works, Thomas Biolsi's Deadliest Enemies and Kathleen Fine-Dare's Grave Injustice, deploy post-colonial analytical strategies to connect Native studies with broader critiques of state power articulated both in theory and in activism. Both address contemporary issues by examining institutionalized violence that remains hidden to most Americans through conventions of law. Both analyze native rights movements and both examine discourses of past and current histories so that American colonialisms on American ground can be seen in clearer light.

These are locally situated studies, written by anthropologists with access to the personal and professional perspectives of key players, and to archives that document claims and counterclaims for lawful authority. Biolsi studies jurisdictional disputes, and writes from a critical race theory perspective; Fine-Dare documents the history and operations of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and she writes from an action research perspective. Both scholars have chosen areas of deep controversy in Indian country today, and neither their subjects nor their authorial positions will please everyone. However, the books vividly illustrate the value and the difficulties of bringing ideas from post-colonial studies to bear on Native American history and anthropology.

Much of the scholarship that focuses on Native histories continues to be bound to traditional categories of study, or to be seen in that way. Our work still tends to be identified with specific historical periods and regional contexts (depending on whether we are historians or anthropologists). When we do not fit into traditional categories our work may be perceived as exclusively local (if the work is grounded in a local context), sentimental (if it involves pathos or “victims”), apolitical (if we work on literary or identity issues or apply cultural studies approaches), or un-academic or faddish (if our approach is applied or performative). These critical categories and categorical criticisms, compelled in part by the institutionalized structures of academic review for our disciplines, have bound Native studies within structures that have limited capacity to critique state power; today they isolate Native American studies from other area studies.

The intersection of anthropology and history, which has helped to transform traditional categories of analysis outside of North America, poses distinctive problems for Native American scholars and scholarship. American ethnohistory was a response to ahistorical forms of cultural analysis that once dominated American anthropological approaches, and ethnohistorical methods and approaches not only historicized Native cultural formations but also helped open scholarship to previously overwritten histories. These have included both oral histories and archival documentation which have transformed “remembered history” from being a relic to a dynamic of scholarship. However, ethnohistories still speak primarily to one another. They have shared a focus on clarifying the historical presence and dynamics of tribally-specific cultural transformations, and have yet to engage the important questions and approaches of other colonial histories in comparative or transnational work. Is the difference an example of American exceptionalism, or does it reflect the exceptionalism of Americanist scholarship?

In recent years, post-colonial studies of Native America have produced exuberant cultural critiques, built on the growing understanding of Orientalisms in scholarly discourse, the growing sophistication of popular cultural studies, and the performative imagination and success of Native artists and cultural strategists. (The inversions and humor that accompany cultural protests inspire intellectuals as much as do the more sober critical formulations of public activism.) Such works have clarified how, in the United States, public discourses from spectacle, to masterworks of literature, to journalism, to policy are layered in mutually referential discourses, saturated with moral qualities, and naturalized though the ordering of the state (see for example Deloria 1998; Scheckel 1998; Strong 1999). However, examining the fantasies and anxieties embedded in the transforming state does not provide insight into how these or other narratives are created, invoked, and maneuvered by the colonized, in this case by Native Americans.

How have Native American histories gone beyond these phases: beyond documenting conquest and the conversion of conquest into administration, beyond the restoration of voices and culturally “different” experiences to mainstream history, and beyond making ironic how Native significata have infused the heroic moments and personages of the emergent nation?

Some recent works have reshaped inquiry: David Wilkins' analysis of federal Indian law cases that illuminates the reproduction of inequities of power (1997); Devon Mihesuah's critical examination of gender, race, and activism (2003); Tsianana Lomawima's study of the dialectics of power and resistance within the hegemonic institution of the boarding school (1994); Gregory Dowd's re-examination of Great Lakes histories of conquest to document epistemologies unrecognized in dominant narratives (2002); Jean O'Brien's study of Natick which complicates native agency during seventeenth- and eighteenth-century state formation (1997); and Ann Marie Plane's reexamination of gender transformations in New England court records on marriage, also during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (2000). Micro-studies embedded within larger cultural histories include Thomas Buckley's analysis of constructs of culture and religious freedom in the Yurok's recent legal battles for restricted access to spiritual grounds, which also examines the problematic roles of expert witnesses, including himself (2002). Another is my own examination of how Indian business was constructed during the recent legalization of a commercial Sto:lo Native fishing economy (1999). All of these works employ quite different approaches, but all are grounded in historical and anthropological detail, and all critically examine complex and intersecting discourses of power.

Complicating the prospect of developing post-colonial studies approaches to Native studies in the United States and Canada is the presence of Indian subjects of inquiry who expect to collaborate in research and publication, involving histories that include intensely personal experiences, and diversities that defy generalization. Research is particularly complicated for scholars who work on colonial studies issues because they may have to convince tribal councils that their work is important. Moreover, these councils are themselves artifacts of the governance structures which scholars would expect to examine. Deadliest Enemies and Grave Injustice contribute to these new movements in Native studies not only because they engage in issues important for critiques of the state, but because they work on issues that bridge tensions of political power that are very sensitive and difficult to traverse comfortably. In this sense—and they are not alone here—they draw on the best of past theory and methods and relate the issues addressed to national and international movements. They foreground material issues, reveal complex ideas and positions, and attend to the sentiments of native leaders. And, most important to the connections between scholarship and advocacy, both make explicit their own boundaries of engagement and analysis.

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In Deadliest Enemies, Biolsi examines technologies of governance in the last decades of the twentieth century, and charts cross-cutting discourses of law that underlie adversarial relations between “Indians” and “whites,” and between a single tribal nation and the state. His site of inquiry is the Rosebud (Lakota Indian) Reservation in South Dakota, and he focuses on jurisdictional disputes between the Rosebud tribe, the state of South Dakota, and the town of Mission, a predominantly white (and white-owned) municipality located wholly within the reservation. This layered context, certainly not unique in Indian country, provides a rich venue for studying tribal government as a “nation within,” with a set of power asymmetries that can be compared in interesting ways with those in other colonial contexts.

Biolsi reveals ongoing, intense conflicts between local whites and Indians that would appear to support the idea that these groups are enemies, and probably deadliest enemies, as the title of his book seems to suggest. However, the phrase “deadliest enemies” does not refer to relations on the ground or in fact; rather, it is a convention of legal scholarship, a foundational premise about local enmity that has been established in federal Indian law and judicial interpretation, and deployed to manage the boundaries of Indian lands and polities. Biolsi argues that the phrase—and the body of law premised on it—reproduces racial antagonisms more than it reflects intrinsic racialized conflicts.

Biolsi traces lengthy legal contests involving Rosebud, including cases regarding the definition of the Rosebud Reservation boundaries, the tribe's right to license a Mission liquor store, and its jurisdiction over state highways on the Reservation, and over non-Indians on the reservation. Judicial decisions wrought over three decades, since 1972, shift back and forth so many times that tribal sovereignty seems precarious at best; gains for the tribe are limited. The issues here are not as sensational or picturesque as those involving casinos, toxic waste dumping, or incineration; all of the events developed over the same time period as tribes took advantage of their right to legislate in parallel (and thus in conflict) with state and federal laws and regulation. Nor are these contests as apparently self-serving as some tribes' sales of cigarettes or liquor without state and federal taxation. But these jurisdictional issues are nonetheless heartfelt ones in Indian country, and Biolsi shows us why.

The study begins with the tribe's daring effort to reframe power relations by claiming that the boundaries of the Rosebud Reservation should contain land that was opened to non-Indian settlement in the early twentieth century. Tribal attorneys argued that the sale of tribal lands never expunged the treated status of those lands. Success would have effectively redefined the residences of hundreds of whites in rural South Dakota as being on reservation land. The suit was initiated in the throes of the Red Power movement, and Biolsi presents it as a very real effort, not a symbolic one. Its lasting victory, however, was to expose the asymmetry of existing state power structures by projecting its reversal. Local whites were shocked and some were fearful. Newspaper editorials from the time, and stories told to Biolsi, articulate fears of Indian “paybacks” if territory were to “fall into their hands.” The tribe's action was not successful in the courts, but the legal contest set the stage for subsequent jurisdictional fights.

Later efforts, which took place within a national context where other tribes were obtaining rights to treaty lands owned and occupied by non-natives, were more successful. Decisions on the liquor licensing battle, for example, went back and forth in the courts, and the tribe, the town of Mission, and the state drafted multiple resolutions and proposals that repeatedly contested one another. In these cases the tribes' rights were expanded.

Biolsi's analysis of these legal battles identifies core contradictions established in the scholarship of Indian law. The sovereignty of tribes locates a place of uniqueness for Indian people under the law, uniqueness that directly conflicts with Constitutional principles that uphold uniformity in the application of the law. As a result of this “perennial conflict,” “the political subjects formed are inescapably racial subjects” (178). Issues of jurisdiction crystallize political struggle at the local level, putting natives and non-natives in structural opposition. Furthermore, these local disputes prevent alliances that might improve economic opportunities throughout the rural area by forcing energies into contests and by preventing local peoples from sharing a perspective on political economy and equity. In economic terms, both “sides” here have much in common. Indians are not alone in living in poverty on Rosebud, where the average income was $4,005 in 1989; 19 percent of the non-Indians in the region had household incomes lower than $10,000 (195).

Biolsi then presses the question, “Why do Lakota people espouse sovereignty if it is so limiting—if it is a form of hegemony?” (189) His careful response reveals the tensions between surface discourses that are controlled and those that “threaten to break loose.”

To illustrate native sensibilities, Biolsi invokes the memories of a Lakota man actively involved in the highway jurisdiction cases. Expressing a belief that whites did and could kill wantonly, the man told of a white policemen who, in Biolsi's words, “thrived on absolute power over others, especially minority others” (190). The Lakota recalled an incident of his youth in which he was “roughed up” by white policemen, and told of his continuing fear of white policemen “off reservation.” Reservation boundaries and race both figure powerfully in this representation, and fears ripple from one context to another over time. Indians relate their current desire for their own police protection to their past loss of land, to religious repression, and to present-day affronts and injustices. Interviews with local whites evoked equally fearful statements that are shaped by the same factors of territorial control and race.¹

For both sides, the fight for jurisdiction stands for the struggle against oppression in its broadest forms.

In interviews, state authorities attribute the chronic local hostilities to the complex interactions of Indian law. But are those the most salient issues? Biolsi cautions that while poverty, violence, and alcoholism among Lakota are equally if not more compelling than jurisdictional issues, concerns about those issues expressed by people from outside of South Dakota are blanketed by a perception that the issues are exclusively local. In this way, these concerns are disconnected from underlying contradictions and disempower both locals and outsiders.

Biolsi's final analysis brings his issues home to the American reader. He identifies the innocence of outsiders as the most damaging product of the “deadliest enemies” principle. That is, law not only confines the local antagonists, but it detaches others from being implicated in their struggles. He attacks the innocence of liberal positions which pin guilt on local political structures and deny the complicity of larger economic and political forces that re-inscribe conditions of colonization. More importantly, by bringing the “outsider” into play, Biolsi effectively reframes his analysis from one that is local to one that looks at the local, leading the reader to experience how the localizing frame of “deadliest enemies” acts as a displacement.

Fine-Dare's work also maneuvers the subject position, engaging her reader through provocative rhetorical strategies.²

With her focus on Native American grave and sacred materials, cultural knowledge, and cultural property, she interrogates what “expert knowledge” is, what its boundaries are, and how it may be contested.

In a work intended to “open up silences,” Fine-Dare begins by characterizing collecting as theft of cultural patrimony prompted by hostile intentions. Drawing on examples as diverse as the Elgin Marbles Scandal in 1811 and the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893, her most generous assessment of anthropology's early history is that there existed a “moral climate” against which anthropologists struggled, but none were “able to completely escape the intellectual climate of his or her milieu” (30). She outlines the arguments supporting the collection of human remains and reveals debates that clashed over scientific principles, but in which all sides shared the premise that harvesting and harboring human remains would have significant intellectual impact. Native views were silenced, part of the ’burying' that began, Fine-Dare reminds us, with the “biological and cultural holocaust” that depleted populations before Lewis and Clark. She anticipates that her rhetoric may be portrayed as sensationalist, but responds that unequal power relations have “everything to do with the discussion about the just return of human remains and cultural objects stored in museums” (51).

Fine-Dare tells us that binary oppositions between native and white, traditionalists and scientists, anthropologists and Indians, do not stand up to scrutiny when we review the history of conflicts over sacred objects. However, working against her effort to demonstrate complexity are images that re-inscribe such dichotomies powerfully. One of the more terrible is a display at the World Columbian Exposition in 1893 of a mummified baby taken from the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The treatment of this native body as a trophy becomes, for Fine-Dare, emblematic of all museum holdings, and all such viewing of “specimens” becomes similarly voyeuristic. Boundaries between public spectacle and scientific examination are blurred in this example, and also in Fine-Dare's commentary on it.

Two chapters review a history of repatriation, sketch relevant federal Indian law, locate broader efforts of reformers, including Indians, and situate some key legislative actions that have supported Native claims to sacred sites, burial places, and objects in the past century. Extended cases illuminate ongoing battles waged by Native leaders working for the return of sacred objects, materials whose organic connection to a tribal or clan group was denied when the objects were sold. The repatriation of Haudenosaunee wampum belts and Zuni fetishes, for example, established precedent for NAGPRA. But repatriation of any object involves a profusion of decisions, and Fine-Dare notes the risk that even the NAGPRA process will itself reproduce past power relations.

The Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), enacted in 1990, gave Fine-Dare responsibility for creating an inventory of grave materials and sacred objects at her home campus at Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, and for communicating with tribal leaders about the project. She uses her own involvement as an extended case to show how historical inequities, in action and in dialogue, might be transformed. Fine-Dare says that by placing the focus of her study—her gaze—upon herself, she hopes to portray and document a different kind of process. Her sensationalist critique has already turned historical “othering” inside out, making scientists into savages and then redeeming them; the next phase averts its gaze from sacred remains even though they are the subject of inquiry. When Fine-Dare continues with her story, the narrative is now framed with boundaries to protect the sacred knowledge and practices of others.

The native people in her story appear as unnamed “tribal representatives”—“the Hopi representative,” and so on. They walk softly before the display cases in a public area, murmuring commentaries on what is shown and how. They disagree with some of the ways in which Fine-Dare structures the information sessions she holds. For example, her division between Pueblo and non-Pueblo groups collapses because some leaders object to it, and she subsequently holds the meetings for all tribes at once. The Hopi representative even takes issue with the structure of her analysis, arguing that the law intends an inventory of each object, not inventories by each collection. Fine-Dare acknowledges that she disagreed with this interpretation, only to learn later that the Hopi representative was right. This level of disclosure hints of the complexities of the process, but it is mystifying at times.

All we learn about how any of the objects at Fort Lewis College have come to be there is from passing statements that some of them were “left on the doorstep” with no information about their provenience or even previous ownership. We are told that there are human remains discreetly shelved behind a screen in a building where a repatriation information meeting is held. (Some elders present at the meeting go into this storage area with ritual blessings to care for them, but Fine-Dare stays behind, in the public space.) Fine-Dare never names any other material. She tells us that she never looked at the artifacts in question, only at their documentation.

Fine-Dare's authorial position serves to protect sacred knowledge from entering into print, and she avoids setting precedent or suggesting guidelines to her readers. The hushed rhetoric contrasts so markedly with her earlier writing that it draws one's attention to her silences. Just as she did not involve herself by looking at the objects, she keeps us from gazing at objects, at their interlocutors, or at the interlocutors' knowledge. This may seem an odd way to protect privacy, but it is familiar territory for those of us working intellectually on all sides of the cultural politics of native cultural property. The deference is an exercise in replacing the imposition of racialized boundaries with decisions negotiated by tribal leaders themselves.

Fine-Dare's sympathetic approach to the repatriation movement acknowledges the “old wounds” that the process opens up for healing, but also urges us to spark change by publicizing concerns shared by many colonized peoples internationally. She believes the repatriation movement's greatest power will lie in its mobilization for the larger causes of redistributive and cultural justice, as part of a broader human rights movement (182).

Biolsi and Fine-Dare both show us how the interventions of critical race theory and action research offer new ways to ground scholarship. Both studies show how native activists and authorities transform discourses, and seed history with multiple narratives and principles that the colonized may employ in political maneuvers. But where do these studies lead us? Biolsi concludes his with the statement, “`[E]quality before the law' de-radicalized the law by excluding class, race, and gender inequalities from its cognizance and from the practical political struggles it underwrites. . . . To the extent that tribal sovereignty is achieved as a legal fact, . . . it becomes more difficult to articulate local problems as connected to larger—ultimately continental and global—colonial processes” (189). Fine-Dare takes a different stance, applauding tribal sovereignty and focusing on tensions of difference in the construction of authoritative knowledge. She, too, calls for the linking of localized movements to broader ones.

These studies illustrate how scholarship on the complex intersections between local and state discourses in the United States and Canada helps situate Native cultural histories as critiques of power that can engage one another and also more effectively engage scholarship of other regions. In our future work, scholars of Native America need to make such connections explicit, continue to attend to activist movements and rhetoric, and share analytical interventions even more than we do now. What knowledge and experience links American colonialisms with those in other states? And what transnational connections have linked Native leaders in the United States with those elsewhere, particularly before the internet age? How does the consolidation of American imperialist interests abroad affect colonial control of Native lands and populations at home, and how do these connections relate and oscillate over time? And how might we see the diaspora of Native peoples in various historical contexts as part of larger globalization movements? We will find no tidy answers to these questions.