Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege ed. by Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien (review)

Reviewed by: Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege ed. by Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien Rose Stremlau (bio) Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege edited by Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien University of Minnesota Press, 2021 DON'T PICK UP Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege looking for a traditional anthology. While this curated collection focuses on historical and ongoing privatization policies enacted by settler governments, it does so creatively and expansively by transcending genre, period, and nation. The volume's coeditors, literary scholar Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) and historian Jean M. O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), have collected over two dozen essays, poems, short stories, and reflections shared by artists, community scholars, and, yes, some academics. Together, these diverse pieces illuminate both the wide-ranging experiences and impacts of settler laws and the "storied resistance" (xi) to them. Heath and O'Brien begin Allotment Stories with an outstanding introduction that explains historical models of land privatization, particularly allotment policy in the United States, and puts them into a broader context of assimilationist land and resource policies enacted by settler states across the globe in the past and the present. They organize Allotment Stories into four thematic sections: "Family Narrations of Privatization," "Racial and Gender Taxonomies," "Privatization as State Violence," and "Resistance and Resurgence." In the first section, essays explain how land privatization systems work(ed) to dispossess Native people and how they still have rippling impacts on families, communities, and nations. All authors consider their kin's stories across generations and emphasize common themes of painful loss balanced with critical understanding and effective responses to policies whose implementation they could not prevent but that they could critique and blunt. The contributions in section 2 demonstrate the triangulation of land ownership, whiteness, and citizenship/political status. Section 3 provides comparative explanations of how settler states have used both economic development and government bureaucracies as weapons no less destructive than guns and bombs. The breadth of this section—comparing national-level policies in the United States, New Zealand, and Canada—is instructive. In the fourth section, authors explore the diverse forms taken by Indigenous resistance: political, economic, social, spiritual, and cultural. [End Page 118] The broad geographic and chronological scope of this section—covering the Sámi homeland through that of multiple Indigenous nations located within the United States (including Alaska and Hawai'i) and Mexico and Palestine—provides rich context for comparison. This collection boasts many strengths; in particular, the authors provide a more nuanced analysis of resistance than in any existing publication on allotment. Reflecting a wide breadth and diversity of Indigenous people, Allotment Stories enables understanding of the range of strategies through which communities responded to these policies. Perhaps because narratives of forceful opposition or legal defeat in the colonizers' courts are so compelling, we too often overlook the quotidian forms of opposition that are the true handmaidens of cultural and political survival. When preventing the implementation of allotment and other land privatization policies proved impossible (which it often has), attention to myriad forms of culturally appropriate resistance and the practices of dissent not only enriches scholarship but also—and more importantly—can provide models for today and for the future. An inspiration and invitation for scholarly reconsideration of how we teach and write about violent, pulverizing privatization policies and their correlated agendas of erasure, Allotment Stories should be read widely within and beyond the academy. This powerful, compelling, and creative pastiche is an outstanding resource and a model for how to critically and comprehensively engage a central theme in Indigenous studies. Many of the essays are short and digestible for student readers, and the decision to include maps, photographs, and reprints of primary sources makes this collection readily teachable. The success of Allotment Stories is that Heath, O'Brien, and the contributors have gifted us with an accessible guide to make sense of the past and to understand how Indigenous Peoples are responding to these policies in the present. As Kelly S. McDonough (White Earth and Irish descent) put it in her outstanding essay on land titles and dispossession in colonial Mexico, "Lessons from...

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