Senier, Siobhan, ed. Voices of American Indian assimilation and resistance.

Red River, Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 256p. notes. bibliog. index. c2001. 0-8061-3490-9. $17.95. A

Siobhan Senier has researched and written a book that is often fascinating but also sometimes difficult to read. Her study centers on the century starting with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 through the Dawes Act of 1887 that granted reservation land to individual tribesmen, to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 that returned certain land to Indian tribes. The underlying assumption of the government of this period was that the American Indians were to be assimilated into the American culture of individual property, agrarian production and Christianity. Senier studies three women of this period: Helen Hunt Jackson, the white author and activist famous for her 1884 novel, Ramona; Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute activist whose Life Among the Piutes [sic] was first published in 1883 with the collaboration of white New Englander Mary Mann; and Victoria Howard. a Clackamas Chinook storyteller whose tales were taken down by white ethnographer Melville Jacobs. Senier's close reading of these texts highlights the possibility that each of these women, in her own way, resisted the assimilation efforts of the American government and well-meaning reformers.

Although Senier can sometimes delve too deeply into the technicalities of native informants and the role of the ethnographer for the casual reader to enjoy, her presentation of the sometimes subtle role of the female activist/writer in protecting and promoting the values of the native culture against invasive external forces is absorbing and valuable. Patricia Moore, Brookline, MA

A--Recommended for advanced students and adults. This code will help librarians and teachers working in high schools where there are honors and advanced placement students. This also will help extend KLIATT's usefulness in public libraries.