This is a book about motion. It follows the development of Crow nationhood across time and through various permutations, ethnic to multiethnic, and finally toward a tribal nationalism, circumscribed by resources and politics, shaped by history, firmly rooted in landscapes.

It is also about reservations, bounded parcels of land, fixed in place, perhaps even in time. And it is about tribalism, also seemingly in stasis, particularly when inscribed upon, and equated with, the reservation.

In Uniting the Tribes, Frank Rzeczkowski asks us to think freshly about tribe and reservation by viewing them as shaped, and conditioned, by the physical movement of people, and the shifting patterns of thought and action, of cultural identity. It is a fine book. From a memorable opening vignette, where a visiting Young Man Afraid of His Horses publicly refers to Crows and Lakotas, historic and deadly enemies, as “one nation, related to each other” (2), Rzeczkowski challenges us to reconsider our tribally centric historiography by following Indian people as they nourished broader relationships that, for a time, embraced a pan-Indian community on the Crow Reservation, as the book's subtitle suggests.

The Crows, decidedly a tribe, and their reservation, most certainly a bounded entity, lie at the center of this story and its many paradoxes. According to Rzeczkowski, “the structures of tribalism on the Northern Plains during the early to mid-nineteenth century … were ideally suited to building a larger sense of community,” and “tribalism enabled people at both individual and community levels to … conceive of their relationships with other Indians, both inside their tribal community and across tribal communities, in new ways” (206–7). But only for a time, and until competition over limited resources and federal policies designed to measure, demarcate, and limit tribal membership spawned a Crow national identity that was ethnic and bounded, rather than multiethnic and in motion.

Uniting the Tribes explores these themes through two sections, each subdivided into several chapters. “Intimate Enemies” focusses on the first decades of reservation life, when Crows established and sustained alliances, friendships, and cordial relationships with similarly situated Northern Plains peoples. Far more complex, varied, fluid, and even individual than conventional stereotypes of tribalism hold, these relationships developed out of pre-reservation practices of visiting, hospitality, intermarriage, and cross-tribal membership in age-graded societies. As Rzeczkowski demonstrates, confinement to reservations did not end inter-reservation movement, and in fact visiting and hospitality took on added significance as competition came to an end, and as Crows and their neighbors came to see shared challenges and interests.

Elements of Crow culture facilitated the development of pan-tribal connections. Matrilineal clans integrated intermarried non-Crow men into local communities. Age-graded societies promoted visiting, and formalized intertribal connections. By the end of the nineteenth century, Crow institutions had combined with Northern Plains traditions of visiting and hospitality to leverage tribalism's latent potential for nurturing a broader Indian identity.

Section Two, “Reimagining Community,” carries Rzeczkowski's reexamination of reservation tribalism into the first decades of the twentieth century. Arguing against conceptualizations of reservations as “hermetically sealed, isolated islands,” and tribes as “neatly bounded entities,” Uniting the Tribes presents both as historical phenomena and intellectual products. The Crow reservation of the early twentieth century demonstrated just how this might function. Comparatively rich in resources, the Crow acted as a magnet for Northern Cheyennes and Lakotas seeking work as freighters and stockmen. Opportunities for wage labor, principally on irrigation projects, drew even more. Some, like members of scattered Cree-Métis communities, had no permanent home. Others simply followed opportunity. The Native American church (whose roadmen, or missionaries, rode railroads from reservation to reservation in yet another nod to mobility) provided additional avenues toward developing pan-Indian sensibilities. Patterns of regional autonomy, where clans and districts controlled adoptions, set the stage for a truly multiethnic Crow reservation.

By the early twentieth century, the reality of a multiethnic reservation challenged BIA bureaucrats. Faced with a dizzying array of family connections and adoption petitions, superintendents largely followed Crow clans and families who exercised autonomy over adoptions. But these accommodations proved short-lived. As allotment segmented and diminished reservation resources, Crows moved to protect their patrimony by revisiting citizenship in light of a renewed ethnic nationhood. The Crow Tribal Council limited adoptions, an act that restricted the autonomy of districts and clans. A few strategic adoptions continued (mostly of whites connected to reservation enterprises), but the trend was decidedly toward bounded, restricted, ethnic, definitions of Crow nationhood, and reservation residence.

It is sometimes argued that ethnohistorians should reject “tribe” or “tribalism” for the dated instruments of colonialism that they no doubt are. Rzeczkowski's fine book offers another path, an opportunity to reinscribe an old concept with new meaning.