Customer Reviews

The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920

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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.

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.