Raymond
I. Orr. Reservation Politics: Historical
Trauma, Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.
239pp. ISBN: 978-0-80-61-53-9
http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/2213/reservation%20politics
In the 1980 Supreme Court Case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians,
the judiciary ordered the payment of "just compensation to the Sioux Nation" in
the form of hundreds of millions of dollars as restitution for the illegal
annexation of the Black Hills in the late 1870s (Blackmun 424). The Lakota
people turned down the government's offer and have continued to do so to this
day, even as the fund set aside for their payment has ballooned with interest
to well over $1billion. The motivating question behind Raymond I. Orr's Reservation Politics: Historical Trauma,
Economic Development, and Intratribal Conflict is: why has the Lakota
leadership declined this wealth in the face of the massive economic and social challenges
facing their people?
It is a fair question and one that is
well worth asking. Orr, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma,
argues that this question, as well as several other contemporary political
questions spread across multiple reservations, can be answered by examining
what he calls a given society's "worldview." This is a spacious term, and Orr
goes to some length pinning it down to a concrete meaning for the purposes of
his argument: "A worldview ... is the
interpretation about the world and our role in it ... constituted from the
intersection of our motivations and how we frame or perceive our surroundings"
(5). In short, Orr's central claim is that to understand why a given tribal
government makes particular political choices, one must first understand the
long-term historical processes at play within a given society, especially the
instances (or absences) of major community trauma.
Reservation
Politics uses a
comparative analysis of three reservation governments – the Citizen
Potawatomi in Oklahoma, the Isleta Pueblos in New Mexico, and the Rosebud Sioux
in South Dakota – to examine the way an Indigenous group's worldview
shapes their reaction to political questions and crises. Orr dives deep into
the often complicated and fraught world of intratribal politics and adeptly
explains the factions, motivations, and fractures at play in a diverse array of
political contexts. Of notable strength is Orr's examination of the Isleta
Pueblo and the importance of witches and other "common secrets" (informal
community knowledge often ignored in scholarly literature) within their
community. In describing complicated, sometimes puzzling, political and social
systems, Orr's analysis and writing is strong and deft.
Equally impressive is the care Orr
shows in describing important, though delicate, social systems and
relationships. He utilizes informant interviews with the respect and care
indicative of long-term, carefully cultivated relationships based upon mutual
trust. On the topic of witchcraft within the Isleta Pueblo community, Orr
readily admits that "there are sensitivities around the subject of witchcraft"
which he understandably respects and which informed his research and writing (150).
But when he "asked those willing to discuss witchcraft whether it should be
written about ... Most told me that writing about Isleta society and politics
would be incomplete" without doing so (150). Here and throughout the text, Reservation Politics takes seriously the
fraught nature of social science research in non-Euro-American cultures and
lets the research subjects and informants guide the argument and evidence.
However, despite Orr's well-placed care,
the book's analysis is nonetheless flawed in critical ways. The historical
processes which serve as explanatory factors in crafting an individual group's
worldview are often ahistorical and overly simplistic. Orr draws on Freud and
Nietzsche (two individuals who, he recognizes, are themselves fraught with
historical baggage) among more contemporary social science research to describe
the role of trauma in Indigenous societies. "Collectively traumatizing events
could be wars, starvation, genocide, and forced relocation," Orr writes, citing
events which North American Indian societies have experienced in spades, and
"it should not be unexpected that years of prolonged and direct experience with
traumatic events ... would incline individuals toward a melancholic worldview" (70-71).
Orr groups his worldview concepts into two broad forms: melancholic, which is
shaped by historical trauma, and self-interested, which is created by processes
of economic development (9). It is in these broad categories, such as trauma,
melancholy, and economic development, that the analysis in Reservation Politics falls short. Trauma, for instance, seems to be
only inflicted by white colonizers, which ignores the complex social and
political webs into which European empires embedded themselves beginning in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Do slave raids by the Yamasee and Westos upon their rivals in the American southeast in the
early eighteenth century count as traumatic experiences with similar
multi-generational effects as forced relocation? Did attacks and horse raids by
nomadic Lakotas and Arapaho upon the more sedentary
Mandan at the beginning of the nineteenth century also create historical trauma
with twenty-first century implications?
To be sure, neither of these events
were destructive on the scale of outright imperial warfare or forced marches
and relocations, but such distinctions are not made in Reservation Politics, and trauma remains an ill-defined concept
throughout the book. Moreover, Orr's deployment of the concept of trauma and
its influence in Lakota politics verges at times on victim-blaming. "Conflict
seems internalized among the Lakotas," he writes
toward the end of the book, "neither the white world, as construed by them, nor
that of outsiders engages in reservation pillaging or conducts raids on this
community ... [C]onflict and violence, I claim, are
often internalized" (178-79). Although it is never explicitly stated, Orr's
implicit answer to the question of why Lakota leadership has refused to accept
the Black Hills restitution is that they have made the choice out of a
deep-seated, community-wide tendency toward self-sabotage and that his
recommendation would be that they simply take the money. This line of argument
is misguided at best, pernicious at worst and is laced throughout the back
third of the text. "Why we are inclined to seek out our disappointments and
frustrations is an interesting question," Orr muses in the final chapter,
before commenting that "[a] community, such as that of Rosebud, seems to
instigate painful events," and while "the Black Hills matter might concern
honor ... the Lakotas, I believe, refuse to find closure
and therefore continue at least some of the trauma of colonization" (185).
Despite his expertise in the politics within Indigenous societies, Orr's
prescriptive message is less than unhelpful here.
Not all the discussion of
multi-generational trauma in Reservation
Politics is quite so tainted. Orr's use of still-emerging epigenetic
science to describe the effects of multi-generational trauma is tantalizing and
worthy of greater inclusion in work by social scientists and humanists.
However, his narrow definition of what constitutes trauma as well as his
apparent diagnosis of flawed Native decision making are difficult to reconcile
with the more well-realized portions of the book. Other important and broad
concepts such as "melancholia" and "economic development" also fail to find
specific historical grounding and are presented as static, vague, and ideal
categories, despite Orr's occasional caveats.
Similarly lacking is Orr's
historiographical intervention. The author is quite right to suggest that
scholars need to produce more historical and social science writing on the
conflicts and politics within reservations in the twentieth century. However,
Orr's argument that historians are loath to do so because they believe "perhaps
it is better to stay quiet on contemporary intratribal and intra-ethnic
politics" because of "sensitivities about what should be said" or because "it
might be more difficult to remain neutral" are unfounded (29). Indeed, several
works exist in the historiography which capably and fearlessly examine the role
intra-tribal conflict has played in Indigenous politics, including Akim Reinhardt's excellent Ruling Pine Ridge (2009) and Paul Chaat
Smith and Robert Allen Warrior's classic Like
a Hurricane (1997), neither of which Orr cites. More research should indeed
be done in this field, but the historiographical hole is not so dire as Orr
contends, nor is there much evidence that historians and social scientists have
avoided the topic out of fear.
Reservation
Politics is a
provocative and often frustrating book. Scholars interested in the issues
facing contemporary Native American societies will find it useful for its
clarity in describing the complex dilemmas facing the three case study
reservations Orr describes. The book is also a good model for how to write
comparative analysis. However, the intellectual framework upon which Orr's
argument rests, while certainly compelling in its unique perspective, is shaky
and significantly less well-conceived.
Stephen
Robert Hausmann, Temple University
Works
Cited
Blackmun,
Harry A. and Supreme Court of the United States. U.S. Reports: United States v. Sioux
Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371. 1979. Retrieved from the Library of
Congress, www.loc.gov/item/usrep448371/.
Reinhardt,
Akim D. Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics
from the IRA to Wounded Knee. Lubbock,
TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2009.
Smith, Paul
Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. Like a Hurricane:
The Indian Movement from Alcatraz
to Wounded Knee. New York City: New Press, 1997.