Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America

I'm going to give her 5 stars for this. She touched with the ugly issues in Indian country most are afraid to talk about.She is also a member of the Cherokee Nation in OK, so it is written with no biased from an Indian standpoint.As the one reader said, keep with the book. It is a very good read on Indian identity in the US. Eva really touches on a lot of the issues in Indian Country and outside as well. From Indian identity to *wannabes* though she never uses this word approaches the topic of undocumented (claimed) Indian ancestry sensitively. She also goes into detail about Identity within the Native American community, fullblood and mix bloods.Native American that did not make enrollment and caused descendants to lose contact with their tribal ancestry and unable to prove ancestry.The issue of Native Americans being the only group of people having to *prove* ancestry. How one can be recognized by a tribe but not by the federal government.Really great read and you really have to be interested in issues in Indian Country and people with American Indian ancestry to keep with the book.

Had to read this for a class. Interesting information.

I LOVED the first half of this book, but had trouble finishing the second half. The first two chapters are GREAT at explaining the problems of identity and give lots of specific examples. Really thought-provoking first half of the book.

Cheap and met my expectations

The delivery is very fast, and the item quality is the same as its description.

this book is good book to use...

Scholarly. Informed. Good resource.

Thanks!

The book is on the topic of different ways of defining Indian or Native American identity, mainly in the USA. It surveys a number of approaches, shows how and where they operate, and then lists problems with them - times they disqualify apparently "real" Indians from Indian status, times they are abused by power-holders, and ways they reproduce white American ideology. The first four chapters deal with biology (blood quantum), legal status (e.g. tribal membership), culture, and self-identification. The argument is roughly as follows. Biology is problematic because of racialist overtones, deteriorating membership across generations, an arbitrary empirical base, and artificial exclusion of those who (for instance) descend from people who resisted early registration. Legal status is based on western or western-modelled institutions, and leaves identity-claims hostage to power-politics. Culture is often essentialised, and used to strip identity from Indians who have partially integrated, "modernised" or migrated - an approach which renders Indians a dying remnant people. Self-identification is mainly criticised because it can be abused by charlatans or white people pretending to be Indians so as to encroach on Indian claims. The author then presents her own alternative, in which identity is based on spiritual kinship and reciprocity with a Native American group. This is modelled on indigenous beliefs and allows both for belonging through blood descent and the recognition of belonging through initiation or socially recognised connection (what's usually called fictive kinship, although Garroutte rejects this term).As a non-specialist in the area I found this a useful mapping of the field, and I appreciated the inclusion of positive and negative comments about the different forms of identity from Native American interviewees, who included both leaders/academics and "ordinary" people. Garroutte clearly sets out the difficulties in constructing identity, and she is refreshingly critical of the power-moves which are often involved in policing identity-boundaries.If I have a criticism, it's the neglect of questions of political economy and ethnogenesis. Groups such as "tri-racial isolates" and New Travellers, and relatively recent arrival indigenous groups such as the Naga and the Comanche, seem to start out non-indigenous and later arguably become indigenous - how and when does this happen, and how can we tell such cases from simply pretending to be indigenous? And where's the boundary between indigenous groups, ethnic groups such as the Kikuyu or Igbo, and (subsistence) peasants? Don't many of the latter groups also have ideas of spiritual belonging, connection to a land-base, reciprocity, and real or fictive kinship as the basis of identity? But this criticism is a bit unfair since it's not really Garroutte's context or focus.