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Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality. Luana Ross. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. x+314 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 0-292-77085-5), $17.95 paper (ISBN 0-292-77084-7).
Despite the growing literature on Native American crime and delinquency, alcoholism and unemployment, and the social ills that plague both urban and reservation Indians, there is a true dearth of information on incarcerated American Indians. Yet Indians comprise disproportionately high percentages of prisoners in all state penal facilities and federal prisons as well. Several factors account for this dearth. First, conducting sociological or anthropological research among incarcerated individuals certainly poses challenges. Second, the presumption that Native Americans prefer not to be studied or analyzed may deter some from considering research on such topics. Third, there is so little literature on the subject of American Indian prisoners that even the scholarly community may not be aware that this is an important phenomenon whose enormous impact on the Indian community warrants intense study.
For this reason - among others - Ross's new book on incarcerated Native Americans is a welcome addition. Ross begins with an important presentation of the historical context in which American Indians began to be perceived as behaving outside the law and proceeds to trace the vacillating federal-state struggle for political control and jurisdiction over tribal peoples. Her discussion of retrocession - the withdrawal of federal control and its replacement by state jurisdiction - is a fine summary of the context in which tribal peoples in the mid- 1900s began to face serious legal challenges in the courts of the non-Indians surrounding reservation boundaries. Ross's premise is that the legal management of Indian affairs is inherently unfair and...