Writing about the American Indian relationship with war is badly needed, so in writing on a topic close to this Paul Rosier has very sensibly decided to shoot at an open goal. That said, patriotism is something of a fuzzy topic and he does not define it across this book's 350 pages. Stylistically, some of those pages make for laborious reading but intellectually the book's primary messages are new and important. In essence it does two really valuable things: it inserts Indians into United States global diplomatic discourse and it gives long-overdue recognition to the often hybrid nature of Indian patriotism in the twentieth century – a patriotism that has combined loyalty to the United States as a homeland with, simultaneously, loyalty to individual sovereign Indian nations. By putting Indian affairs in a broader, international context he does the field a great service. We learn, for example, about the conflation of Indian ways with communism during the allotment era and again during the termination era, and of how the Filipino-American War at the beginning of the century was promulgated as an extension of the wars waged against American Indians. We learn how Indian leadership used the rhetoric of concern for the world's “little peoples” that was popular in the years surrounding the First World War to advance Indian concerns and protect Indian lands; we learn about how the Cold War played out in Indian country; about how, despite the magnitude of sacrifice made by Indian peoples fighting foreign wars, when it came to upholding treaties and applying the principles of democracy domestically, Indians lost out. The message about the breadth and depth of Indian sacrifice in wars to serve American interests across the twentieth century and beyond has yet to fully reverberate within American scholarly and popular discourse. Rosier explores how, instead of recognizing Indian sacrifice, Americans have continued, during the Vietnam War, during US military operations in El Salvador, and during the 1991 Gulf War, to conflate foreign enemies with Indians.

This book would have been improved had the author been encouraged to lose his tendency to generalize and had it contained more Indian voices. This is, after all, a twentieth-century history and there are living individuals and archives to do with recently living individuals which have a lot to say about the nature of Indian patriotism. Listening and, if needs be, generating those stories is, it seems to me, as important for modern history as is use of Indian organizational papers. This might have led to us learning more about the diversity of forms Indian patriotism has taken, about how it is understood across the generations, genders and class affiliations. It is worth remembering that modern versions of Indian patriotism include not just men like Ira Hayes (Pima) who almost touches the flag in Joe Rosenthal's famous photograph of the second flag-raising on Iwo Jima, 23 February 1945, but also men like Leonard Peltier (Ojibway/Dakota Sioux), in prison now for over thirty-four years for his interpretation of patriotic activity. That diversity and its often messy, political and complex expression are too important to ignore.