Hidden Treasures of the American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott.

Hidden Treasures of the American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo, and Alice Marriott. By Patricia Loughlin. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, c. 2005. Pp. xxii, 234. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8263-3802-X; cloth, $32.50, ISBN 0-8263-3801-1.)

Patricia Loughlin's book is an important contribution to American Indian and women's history, most notably to the recovery of the many female "hidden scholars" of anthropology identified two decades ago by Barbara Babcock and Nancy Parezo (p. 112). It is also an overview of Oklahoma historiography, with sensitive attention to state exceptionalism and to the feminization of local history and regionalism in the early twentieth century.

The focus is on a trio of professional historian-ethnographers. Alice Marriott, in some ways the one who opted to live most on the margins, was an experimental ethnographer who wrote deliberately for a wide public and who spent a good deal of time living among the Kiowa and other indigenous peoples about whom she wrote. In the 1930s Marriott worked as a field representative for the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB). The IACB was part of Indian Commissioner John Collier's revitalization program for Native American peoples, which sought to encourage the production and marketing of Native American art. In a period when the Southwest was fetishized as the site of native authenticity, Marriott worked tirelessly to elevate Oklahoma's indigenous cultures, and she produced several acclaimed books, including The Ten Grandmothers (Norman, 1945).

The other two women examined in this book were more self-consciously professional. One is Angie Debo, who won national renown for her books decrying the exploitation of Native American people in Oklahoma. The only one of the three to have earned her Ph.D., Debo failed to secure the university position she wanted. But Loughlin argues that it was precisely this exclusion from academia that allowed her to lake on state graft and corruption, while other historians were timidly pulling their punches. In Loughlin's reading, Debo's voluminous output reveals an uneasy tension between two main threads in Oklahoma historiography: Turnerian progress (exemplified in Debo's boosterist books about white settlers, which included her family) and Boasian relativism (which Debo pursued in her books about Choctaw and Creek people, among others).

Perhaps the most intriguing chapter in this book is the one focusing on the conflict between Debo and her lesser-known but utterly fascinating colleague, Muriel Wright, a Choctaw historian. The daughter of a Presbyterian missionary woman and a powerful Choctaw politician, Wright wrote Oklahoma histories and high school textbooks celebrating the accomplishments of native people. From 1943 to 1973 she was the editor of the prestigious Chronicles of Oklahoma. She was proud of both sides of her lineage--the ancestors who came over on the Mayflower as well as the Choctaw chief who coined the term Oklahoma.

Wright and Debo butted beads. Wright accused Debo of overgeneralizing and failing to acknowledge tribal gains, while Debo made Wright look like she was whitewashing the past. This story--which pits upper-class Indian against working-class settler and political conservative against earnest liberal--makes for an eminently readable account of public women intellectuals who both challenged and were challenged by the boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, and professionalism.

SIOBHAN SENIER

University of New Hampshire