The many ways in which the South has invented and perpetuated its own romanticized version of its history, in which white people were robbed of land and culture, and in which they can appear as innocent victims of modernity and commercialism, have by now been well noted and discussed. In her fascinating new book Melanie Benson Taylor extends this idea of the white southern lost cause in an interesting and provocative direction by bringing it into relation with the Native South, and exploring the parallels between the two sets of experiences and, more importantly, the ways in which they have been memorialized. It may be provocative enough to lump together the Native American experiences of dispossession and cultural destruction with those of white southerners, but it is potentially even more provocative to suggest that their reactions and strategies for cultural survival also have something in common. While aware of the risks involved, Benson argues that is now time to see them as occupying the same space “both material and discursive” (207), and argues that while we have defused southern mythmaking “we have been notably more hesitant to deconstruct Natives' similar and no less compensatory fictions” (21). As well as having similar pasts of dispossession and loss, they are both situated in relation to the forces of global capitalism, and Benson does not shy away from insisting on the ways that this relation is inevitably one of complicity. As she points out, though the rhetoric may be that of holding out against the incursions of capitalism and modernization, both groups also find “their survival and identity thoroughly enmeshed in the principles and privileges of that same system” (119), whether this is in the development of tourism or of natural resources.

While the book expertly and concisely outlines the larger historical and cultural picture, Benson's main approach is through the recent literature of the various groups, and one of the most refreshing aspects is the way the accounts of the writing avoid the rather celebratory or overrespectful assumptions about Native identity and cultural survival. This is not to suggest, though, that Benson is unsympathetic to the situation of Native people, or that she downplays the wrongs of the past. It is rather that she maintains an unblinking scepticism about any easy claims of identity or authenticity, from whatever quarter.

The book begins with an examination of the ways Indians have been used as part of a discourse of southern authenticity and loss, using an interesting range of writers – Faulkner, inevitably, but also Barry Hannah and Forrest Carter. Benson shows how Indians have been used and continue to be used as a sort of a guarantee of indigeneity by proxy, a process which buttresses southern claims to an authentic identity even while it effaces Indian presence and primacy, before she moves on to show Native writers Louis Owens, LeAnne Howe and Diane Glancy engaging with the same themes.

The next chapter deals with the ways in which the complex relation between African Americans and Indians has been shaped by prevailing southern racial ideologies. This has often meant Indians dissociating themselves from their kinship with African Americans, and from “the messy, imbricated, hybrid realities” lived by many in the South (23). Benson pinpoints the irony that because of their different histories, Indians and African Americans now have different avenues of self-determination. While they were once enslaved (sometimes to Indians), African Americans now have a freedom to define themselves, while Indians are involved in a struggle for sovereignty and identity based on racial categories that are potential traps. As she observes, the kinship, the “dirty, difficult negotiations of color and culture,” are much more likely to be acknowledged and explored from the African American side than from the Indian (109), though she does discuss Geary Hobson's The Last of the Ofos (2000) as well as work by Dawn Karima Pettigrew.

The third chapter is concerned to show how any appeal to the authenticity of the local, regional or indigenous needs to be seen in the context of the effective obliteration of the histories and memories, as well as the economy, which might sustain them, as everything is subsumed within a global capitalism. All parties in the South are affected by this, and often by a shared reluctance to move beyond the opposition between tradition and modernity or indigeneity and capitalism, and Benson makes good use of Geary Hobson's work, and Cherokee writer Jerry Ellis's Walking the Trail (2001), which is an account of retracing the Trail of Tears in reverse direction, to show the problems in finding identity within these oppositions.

Chapter 4 turns more hopefully to possibilities of a shared or common ground, a new kind of localism which would get beyond the exclusionary and essentialist legacies of the past, and the illusions of sovereignty or autonomy based on them. Looking at the work of Native writers including Marilou Awiakta and Janet McAdams, as well as Virginian Belle Boggs, Benson finds suggestions of ways to “remake new genealogies and communities in ways that are truly regenerative and inclusive” (200), and offer a truly hybrid “relational regionalism” that might afford a way of responding to global capitalism (18).