Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians

Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians. Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Duke University Press, 2005).

As somebody who received his previous degree in North Russia in a program related to Northern European history, I know how complicated scholarly writing can be when it comes to ethnic minorities which had for many decades been an object of different types of modernist projects aimed at “civilizing” them.  In the Northern European context, this ethnic minority are Sami (known under derogatory names as Laplanders or even “Self-Eaters,” Samoyeds, in Russian), whom Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Russian political and cultural elites constructed in the same manner as Native Americans were the object of social engineering on behalf of White Canadians and Americans. 

In this respect, Prof. Raibmon’s writing seems to me nearly perfect in the way she manages to return agency to the people who had been regarded by the previous academic traditions as mainly devoid of such. Her analysis of performers at the Chicago World Exhibit, of hop pickers in Washington and of Aboriginal residents of Sitka is exemplary in the way that she manages to demonstrate how Native Americans used resources provided by the new socio-economic environment to reach their own social or economic ends. This approach, far from deterministic, makes her explanatory model more complex and, thus, more credible.

My questions to the author are related to some aspects of the same relationship (Native American – White population) which is the object of her research. I wonder to what degree accommodation to stereotypes and patterns of behaviour imposed by the dominant culture was part of this relationship, as it is obvious that resistance or reconceptualization of dominant social norms was not the only possible strategy for Native Americans as social agents. My second question would be about the other side of this relationship. The White population of American and Canadian West coast was, obviously, far from homogeneous in social or political terms, and its response had to be also diverse. To what degree this White-Native relationship changed the White communities of the West Coast and how accommodation of Whites (in form of mixed marriages, for example) itself changed the nature of this relationship.