Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege

By shifting the focus from policy to people, Allotment Stories offers a fresh and deeply compelling retelling of the privatization of Indigenous lands. The book eschews mooring discussions of allotment in the 1887 Dawes Act in the United States. Instead, this collection of more than two dozen community-centered essays or creative contributions showcases how Indigenous people across the globe resiliently grappled with and responded to the consequences of a variety of efforts at land privatization. The book has a broad geographic and temporal scope. Many contributions focus on the continental United States and Canada, but the collection also includes essays that address Aotearoa New Zealand, Mexico, Palestine, Hawaii, Alaska, the Sápmi region of northern Europe, and Guam. Although a few take on earlier periods, most essays examine nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, or contemporary contexts. Taken together, the essays testify to diverse and dynamic Indigenous resistance, restoration, and resurgence in the face of shared experiences of land privatization.The collection is organized into four thematic sections. The first draws on the family stories of the contributors to trace the results of land privatization within families over time and includes notable contributions from the book’s editors, Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien. O’Brien’s essay, for example, incorporates her grandmother’s writings to show how allotment when coupled with Ojibwe traditions of mobility unexpectedly spurred the creation of new, vibrant Indigenous communities. Sections 2 and 3 examine divisive entanglements of land privatization with white supremacy, gendered ideologies, and state violence. Finally, essays in the last section more directly address themes of Indigenous resistance and resurgence that run through the whole book. The book is an admirable model of how a multidisciplinary collection can illuminate the deeply intimate and relational dimensions of a legal and administrative policy.The collection is thoughtfully situated to address the current moment. Speaking to the growing field of global Indigenous studies, the book is well suited to the classroom and includes a glossary of key terms for nonspecialists. Many authors also directly address contemporary political issues and ongoing efforts to privatize Indigenous lands, and an afterword by Stacy L. Leeds contextualizes the recent decision of the Supreme Court in McGirt v. Oklahoma. Although the essays gravitate around colonial efforts to divide and dispossess, Indigenous resiliency represents the dominant theme of this timely and enriching collection.