Fisher Publishes Shadow Tribe
Associate Professor Andy Fisher has published Shadow Tribe: The Making of Columbia River Indian Identity, with the University of Washington Press. The book is part of the Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture-Book Series in Western History and Biography.
Here is a description of the book, taken from the publisher's website.
Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific
Northwest's Columbia River Indians - the defiant River People whose
ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in
central Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional
accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story
illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and
the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light
of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering
presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes
down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American
colonization.
Based on more than a decade of archival research
and conversations with Native people, Andrew Fisher's groundbreaking
book traces the waxing and waning of Columbia River Indian identity from
the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Fisher
explains how, despite policies designed to destroy them, the shared
experience of being off the reservation and at odds with recognized
tribes forged far-flung river communities into a loose confederation
called the Columbia River Tribe. Environmental changes and political
pressures eroded their autonomy during the second half of the twentieth
century, yet many River People continued to honor a common heritage of
ancestral connection to the Columbia, resistance to the reservation
system, devotion to cultural traditions, and detachment from the
institutions of federal control and tribal governance. At times, their
independent and uncompromising attitude has challenged the sovereignty
of the recognized tribes, earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as
radicals and troublemakers even among their own people.
Shadow
Tribe is part of a new wave of historical scholarship that shows Native
American identities to be socially constructed, layered, and contested
rather than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his vantage point on
the Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study that uses regional
history to broaden our understanding of how Indians thwarted efforts to
confine and define their existence within narrow reservation boundaries.
Andrew
H. Fisher is associate professor of history at the College of William
and Mary.
"This splendid book deserves a wide audience. In
exceptionally graceful prose, Andrew Fisher adds an absorbing, important
story to the emergent scholarship on American Indian identity. His
account of Columbia River Indians' long resistance to their displacement
and political redefinition is frank and sensitive, wise and sometimes
wry. Drawing on meticulous research and abundant Indian commentary,
Fisher details the process that gave rise to a distinct but continually
contested Columbia River tribal identity-an identity inseparably linked
to competing tribal formations created by federal law. Because the
forces that shaped tribal affiliations along the Columbia also affected
Indians elsewhere, Shadow Tribe not only fills a crucial void in the
literature on Pacific Northwest history; it offers valuable lessons for
all scholars of Indian and ethnic history." -Alexandra Harmon,
University of Washington
"Andrew Fisher has written a superb book
that tells a story of near-forgotten Indians who refused to move to the
reservations and continued to live a traditional life along their
beloved Columbia River. The dramatic story of their survival from the
nineteenth deep into the twentieth centuries is a moving narrative that
is both authentic and colorful." - Clifford Trafzer, University of
California Riverside
"Shadow Tribe focuses on Indian communities
that remained and evolved within important historic areas not on the
reservations, in which the communities' complicated relationship with
the Indian peoples on the reservations is as much a part of the story as
the engagement with non-Indian society outside of the reservations." -
John Shurts, author of Indian Reserved Water Rights
"In this
finely crafted book, Andrew Fisher provides a richly textured history of
the making of a distinct identity among Indians of the Columbia River.
By revealing the limits of 'tribal' histories and uncovering the
complexities of identify formation, Fisher makes a signal contribution
to American Indian studies. A work of impeccable research and analysis,
Shadow Tribe is also an eloquently told story of heroic persistence in
the face of tragedy and loss." - Jeff Ostler, University of Oregon
"Andrew
Fisher's fine book asks us to reconsider the particular places and
symbolic spaces in which American Indians of the Pacific Northwest have
sustained their cultural identity and legal rights independent of
reservation-based political authority. Though focused on the compelling
story of Columbia River Indians' struggles of community maintenance,
this important study will benefit all scholars of American Indian
history and ethnic studies." -Paul C. Rosier, author of Serving Their
Country: American Indian Politics and Patriotism in the Twentieth
Century
