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Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, eds. Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2011. isbn: 978-0-89672-732-8. 384 pp.
The volume Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History, edited by Susan A. Miller and James Riding In, is a useful and tightly curated collection of essays by prominent Native scholars, all united in a mission to "challenge academic hegemony" and to "expose the dishonesty of. . . hegemonic myths," as the editors reveal in their introduction. As a supplement to the primary textual materials most examined by scholars of Indigenous literatures, this collection of essays reveals the disciplinary decolonization tactics used by Indigenous historians, tactics employed in academic and home-community domains.
As Susan A. Miller writes in the volumes opening essay, "Native America Writes Back: The Origins of the Indigenous Paradigm in Historiography," the writing of Indigenous history must serve Indian communities, as must American Indian studies as a discipline. In this way the sharp contrast with traditional American historical study is drawn: the work of Indigenous historiographers is decidedly not neutral (38). In such work, names are named and events are described accurately with terms such as atrocity or genocide, which non-Native historians have typically avoided (14). Indian communities must benefit by the work, and Indigenous historiography must not "encode the innocence of the nation-state in their invasions and seizures of Indigenous peoples' lands" (23). Such explanations indicate the tenor of this collection and its relevance to scholars of Indigenous literatures, for whom this volume can serve as a companion to titles in literary studies that advocate for Indigenous/tribal approaches to Native texts and the application of theoretical, analytic lenses that emerge from Native communities and discourses (well-known texts in this vein are Robert Allen Warrior's Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions; Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Warrior's American Indian Literary Nationalism; and Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism).
Native Historians Write Back begins with Miller and Riding In's useful introduction, which positions the text as one unapologetically designed to first address and then reject colonial paradigms as they pertain to the telling of Indigenous histories. The four sections that follow feature previously published works by leading Indigenous historians from many tribes. The...