Harmon, Alexandra: "Indians in the Making"

[David Robertson]

Subtitled "Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound".
Published by University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998.

A very well-researched book by a lawyer who has worked for various NW
tribes and is a historian of admirable insight.

Not to attempt a full review of the book -- It's swell, read it!

Harmon's idea is that "Indian" and "White" identity came to exist through
a complex process of interaction between the original people of the Puget
Sound region and the newcomers from Europe and elsewhere.

She convincingly shows that in effect there was no such thing as an
"Indian" before the newcomers showed up.  People's primary loyalty was to
a household group, which made its living independently of all other
household groups.  There was a historically noticeable period during which
people *began to adopt and develop* the concepts "Siwash", "Boston" (and
"King George"--Harmon ingeniously uses these Chinook Jargon labels
throughout her exposition in order to maintain the reader's awareness of
the initial foreignness of these notions), "tribe" and so on.

Historical trends spotlighted in her discussion include a great many of
interest to those who have followed discussions on our CHINOOK list:
Racialism, translations during treaty-making sessions, intermarriage,
popular media portrayals of Indians, George Gibbs' personal attitudes, and
more.

Samples of Chinook Jargon included in the text and in her very extensive
documentary endnotes will be of great use to many who study the language
and its history.  For example, how many of us were aware that "in January
1853 the _Columbian_ newspaper devoted its entire front page to a jargon
dictionary, then ran the feature again in response to readers' demands"?
There's repeated note in this book that Indians often regarded CJ as
"a sort of white man's talk", in Swan's words, and whites had a tendency
to consider it an "Indian language".  (Shawash wawa; how interesting!)

Although the last 150 pages consist of dense documentation in the form of
notes, the body of the text, some 250 pages, is an absorbing and
accessible read.  Give this book a try if you think you might enjoy having
a sense of the conditions in which widely differing cultures came into
contact in the NW and became dependent on one another for their senses of
identity.

LhaXayEm.
Dave



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