Geoff Hamilton has been engaged in a project over the past decade, to examine the concept of autonomy in American culture as it has evolved from Independence to the present day. In his previous book, The Life and Undeath of Autonomy in American Literature (2014), this involved a sweeping analysis of many well-known primary texts, the better to trace interrelated concepts of individualism and self-rule through two centuries. One criticism of that book in reviews at the time was that it heavily concentrated on authors who are white, male and canonical: the current text might be seen as something of a response. Here Hamilton adopts a method in each chapter of pairing a canonical, white, male author with a Native American counterpart. Thus Jefferson meets Occom, Emerson is paired with Apess, Twain contrasted with Winnemucca, Hemingway with Zitkala-Ša, and so forth, in readings that bring out some unexpected and fascinating resonances. A story is created of a Euro-American conception of self-rule based on exclusion and possessiveness, and gradually petering out into atomized disconnection as a result, as opposed to a Native concept of a self-rule that remains grounded in community and responsibility to the natural world.

Hamilton sets out to explore what he terms “eunomia,” borrowing the term from the Greek goddess Εὐνομία and more generally from the Athenian tradition of eunomia as established by Solon. Hamilton argues that the etymology of this term, which combines ευ- (well, good) with νόμος (law or rule), and the latter term of which can be traced back to νομεύς (pasture), means that we can interpret Eunomia as an “ecological compact” (1), and thus relates it to the Haudenosaunee creation mythos. This might overstate the importance of the word's origins, given that it was in use for centuries in Spartan thought prior to its Athenian adoption, and it is a real weakness of this book that Hamilton gets his explanation of this central term out of the way within a scant two pages of text, and then refers the reader to his previous monograph for a deeper explanation of other Greek terms (prominently themis and autonomia). As it is, there seems no great justification for adopting a Greek term with a complex history that already summons up the ghost of all sorts of ancient assumptions about savage/civilized dynamics, and I can't help thinking that a neologism would have served equally well, other than that it allows for a consonance with Hamilton's larger project.

The book traces dysnomia in Euro-American individualist philosophy, ending with Don DeLillo's entirely atomized protagonist in Cosmopolis, cut off from the world in his limousine, and parallels this with a Native tradition of eunomia that stresses self-responsibility within community. In doing so, sometimes the pairings seem a little forced, particularly in later chapters. Too often, a chapter will read more like two separate readings rather than a sustained comparison, with the one on Twain and Winnemucca being particularly notable in that regard. Here the rigid structure of the book and relatively small number of examples results in a somewhat simplified view of heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions.

What's truly admirable about this book is its ambition and range. As Hamilton notes, it runs counter to the current predominant trend in Indigenous literary academia of studies narrowly focussed on specific tribal traditions and/or time periods. There have been very few monographs in the past decade or more that have attempted both a broad synthesis of Native writing and a detailed and lengthy comparison with Euro-American equivalents. However, such monographs have fallen out of fashion at least partly due to the danger of falling into overly easy generalization with an outsider's perspective, and I am not entirely sure that the text under review entirely avoids this danger. Like many such monographs, it ends with Gerald Vizenor as primus inter pares, but Vizenor is such a sui generis writer that this seems to reflect his place in the conventional canon more than it does his place within Indigenous thought. A chapter on writers whose writing inverts the Euro-American–Native eunomic–dysnomic paradigm would have strengthened and deepened the thinking on the topic by allowing for nuance, where the conventional and structural choices here create readings that are individually excellent (I can see many of these chapters appealing to students) but in the end reinforce fairly binary ideas of Native/non-Native dynamics.