The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889?1920 [Hardcover]

Melissa L. Meyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1994

This compelling interdisciplinary history of an Anishinaabe community at the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota offers a subtle and sophisticated look at changing social, economic, and political relations among the Anishinaabeg and reveals how cultural forces outside of the reservation profoundly affected their lives.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Melissa Meyer combines historical methods with approaches from sociology, anthropology, and economics to produce a thought-provoking account of the evolution and development of a single reservation community. . . . Rather than focusing solely on Indian/white relations, as historians have often done in the past, Meyer highlights the relations between conservative Anishinaabe bands and . . . `mediators' [of mixed descent]. In doing so, she reveals the diversity within the White Earth Anishinaabe community. . . . Meyer's meticulously researched case study is one of the most significant contributions to the field of Indian history in recent years."-Western Historical Quarterly (Western Historical Quarterly )

"An enduring contribution to Anishinaabe historiography as well as a significant work for the comparative study of indigenous dispossession throughout North America."-Ethnohistory (Ethnohistory )

"A rich history of the Anishinaabe . . . This is not a history of Indian policy, but rather the story of an ethnic community in all its complexities, contradictions, and subtleties."-Choice (Choice )

About the Author

Melissa L. Meyer is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 333 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (January 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803231547
• ISBN-13: 978-0803231542
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,776,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!, December 12, 2006

By 

Matchikwewis (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920 (Paperback)

Meyer does an excellent job detailing the complex history of dispossession on the White Earth Reservation during the early 20th century. American Indian history is often portrayed as simplistic; Meyer avoids this entirely and, instead, her meticulous research brings a story of diversity, deceit, and contradiction to life. This is a compelling tale of economics, politics, and social change. Meyer does not sugar coat the reality of the involvement of federal, state, and local officials in what is one of the most outrageous scandals in U.S. history. This is also a story of identity and how the U.S. employed race and racialization of Anishinaabeg as the ultimate means of dispossession.

3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wordy and Hard to Follow, March 21, 2005

By 

Boone-Tang "Of The Boone-Tang Clan" (Fargo, ND United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920 (Paperback)

I set about reading this book for class. Halfway through, I was still confused about what was all happening, because it felt as though the author was writing the pages as they entered her head, with little orginization. A paragraph will cover several years of statistics, and the next will be about an entirely different decade, either later or earlier, or it will suddenly change locales without notice (white earth one paragraph, mil lacs the next, back to white earth, etc). It was also very heavily dependent on names, which also seemed to switch between christian names and anishinaabe names without notice. Finally, it felt as though a thesaurus had been dug out for most of the book, as the wording was often higher than would be used in normal conversation, which made you have to sit and think about certain words because you were unaccostomed to seeing/hearing them.