IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN NATIVE AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP

Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law. By David J. Carlson. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. viii + 217 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 (paper).

We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community. By Martha Harroun Foster. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. xii + 306 pp. Maps, photographs, illustrations, graphs, tables, notes, bibliography, glossary, appendix, and index. $29.95 (cloth).

Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform. By Lucy Maddox. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. x + 205 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth).

Gail D. MacLeitch
King's College

In recent years, burgeoning scholarship on Native Americans has highlighted the complex issue of Indian identity. Three works by David J. Carlson, Martha Harroun Foster, and Lucy Maddox add to this literature in important yet distinct ways. Carlson examines the relationship between legal discourse and identity formation in a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Native American autobiographies. Foster looks at the creation and maintenance of a distinct Métis ethnic identity among the Spring Creek community of Montana. And Maddox explores how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Native American intellectuals enacted Indian "performances" to carve out a public space in which they could articulate their own understanding of Indianness.