In this substantial collection of Native American writing David Martínez has chosen thirty-one pieces in which he sees evidence of a distinctive intellectual engagement with the changing political and legal realities of Indian life in America. He divides his material into three historical periods (the Colonial period to Removal, reservation system to reform, and 1930s to 1970s), and each section is prefaced with a useful essay giving the historical and political context. There are also helpful and extensive bibliographies provided for each writer. The collection offers a good range of interesting writing, coming not only from the expected figures like Occom, Apess, McNickle, La Flesche, Zitkala-Sa, and Ella and Vine Deloria, but also from many fascinating and lesser-known individuals such as Laura Cornelius Kellogg, so to this extent the collection is to be welcomed. What is less convincing, though, is the claim implicit in the title, that this is “the” American Indian intellectual tradition. Martínez describes the development of “a tradition of indigenous thinking” (ix) combining personal experience, indigenous learning from the oral tradition, and an element of education from white schools. This would certainly be a useful way of exploring a distinctive and quite diverse intellectual tradition, but in fact what Martínez is really interested in is the political and legal history of Indian–white relations, and “the process of assimilating Anglo-American legal and political tools into Indian communities” (xiii), and his selections almost entirely reflect this.

It is certainly arguable that one of the main ways in which Indian intellectual activity needed to be pursued was through interaction with and reaction to white laws and policies, just because the whole question of Indian identity – personal, national and cultural – related to their legal situation. And it would be reasonable to call this “an” intellectual tradition. But there has also been a strong strand of religious thought which has had to adapt to Christianity, evinced in syncretic movements or variations of Christian thought. It could also be argued that the work of Native Americans in anthropology, whether as informants or as independent anthropologists, represents an important and distinctive form of intellectual engagement that is ignored here.

There are a number of works which Martinez might have engaged with in his introduction, in order to develop a fuller sense of the tradition. Lucy Maddox, in her Citizen Indians (2005), for instance, shows how the figures she is dealing with rise to the challenge of articulating a specifically Native perspective within or against what were seen by the dominant society as universal values, while Robert Allen Warrior, in Tribal Secrets (1995), compares Vine Deloria and John Joseph Mathews (an important figure completely ignored by Martínez) to give a broad-based account of the quest for a workable concept of sovereignty. Some acknowledgement of these discussions would have helped Martínez to offer a more complex sense of the intellectual activities involved in his authors, and prompted him to broaden his selection. (Even in the case of those figures who have produced a wide range of writings, like Eastman or Deloria, the selections are still restricted to the political and legal.)

More attention to the complexity of the stratagems used by the writers, and not just to the political context, would also have helped the reader to see what the editor found relevant in some of these selections. If we are looking for a distinctive American Indian engagement with the principles of Western law or Christian theology which we could call an intellectual tradition then there are slim pickings to be found in many of the earlier pages of this volume. Often we find only the odd glimpse of a mind turning and twisting to adapt the dominant tradition, rather than a sustained engagement with the tensions between two traditions. This may be because the writer in question really is fully within the Western tradition, or because he or she has to write in that way, in order to gain a public platform (the much-discussed issue of the “hidden transcript”). This is, of course, a larger problem, and one which Martínez cannot be expected to solve, but he might perhaps have given more direction to the reader, to show just where he sees the distinctive engagement that his useful collection celebrates and makes available.