The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924 by Cristina Stanciu (review)

Reviewed by: The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924 by Cristina Stanciu James H. Cox (bio) The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924 Cristina Stanciu Yale University Press, 2023 STANCIU OPENS her book with a New York Times article from 1923, near the end of the forty-five years under her consideration. In familiar Progressive Era fashion, the article represents Indigenous people and immigrants as "problems" to solve as part of the process of forming a U.S. national identity. Stanciu's study shows Indigenous people and immigrants as agents in this process: What role did they play, she asks, in the conversations about Americanization and what it means to be an American? What impact did they have on definitions of American identity? How, too, did their contributions align in heretofore unacknowledged or understudied ways, especially by rejecting exclusion while also preserving cultural specificity in the decades between the opening of Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the passing by Congress in 1924 of the Immigration (Johnson-Reed) Act and Indian Citizenship Act? Stanciu addresses these questions by drawing on the methods of Indigenous studies, American studies, settler colonial studies, and literary and film studies. The introduction and first two chapters establish the foundational historical and political contexts in which Indigenous people and immigrants navigated the forces of assimilation and acculturation. Specifically, Stanciu outlines the legal landscape of citizenship and naturalization for both Indigenous people and immigrants and the history of Americanization as a specific movement driven by the federal government and numerous public and private institutions. Each chapter contains memorable insights characteristic of Stanciu's research. In the first chapter, Stanciu notes that the Competency Commission's citizenship ceremonies influenced the creation of naturalization ceremonies for immigrants. In the second, which includes a sharp, compelling analysis of the politics of an unrealized memorial to American Indians in New York, she assesses the turn from the identification of Indigenous people as "vanishing Americans" to "First Americans" as a strategic response by white Americans (specifically, the descendants of earlier groups of European colonizers) to an increase in immigration primarily from central and southern Europe. The following six chapters alternate focus between Indigenous people and immigrants and the various media in which they participated as authors and End Page 144 creators and in which they were represented. Chapters 3 and 4 take student writing at Carlisle and in the foreign language press, respectively, as their focus; chapters 5 and 6 consider the writing by the leaders of the Society of American Indians and by immigrant authors; and chapters 7 and 8 look at industrial films and silent films of the early Hollywood era. Each chapter examines the tools of coercion used by teachers and school administrators, politicians, corporations, filmmakers, and others to facilitate Americanization and the strategies used by Indigenous people and immigrants to get their voices, experiences, and perspectives heard. Stanciu finds strategic affiliations (a poet writing in Yiddish draws a correlation between Jewish and Indigenous experiences of oppression; Carlos Montezuma speaking on the shared desire of Indigenous people and immigrants to become citizens) and divergences (increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in the Society of American Indians at the end of the First World War; settler-colonial attitudes and stereotypes of Indigenous people in immigrant writing) between the two groups. She identifies a wide range of views within each group, too, as individuals—novelists and filmmakers, journalists and editors, students and activists—and their allies decided how best to face the political and economic power of the Bureau of Naturalization, Ford Motor Company, Americanism Committee of the Motion Picture Industry, and Hollywood, among other institutions working to enforce a narrowly defined U.S. national identity (Christian, capitalist, English speaking) and to restrict U.S. citizenship by race, nationality, and religion. Dissent in this hostile environment often appears in subtle forms: students at Carlisle attempt to Indigenize the school's publications; James Young Deer/James Young Johnson tells a story of surviving rather than vanishing in White Fawn's Devotion (1910); Abraham Cahan illuminates the poignant consequences of his protagonist's effort to assimilate in his...