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Book Review: Tuscarora: A History by Anthony F.C. Wallace
(2013)
Abstract
On the cover of Anthony F. C. Wallace’s book, Tuscarora: A History, are featured a map of the Six Nations’ territory from 1851 and two pieces of quiltwork. These images provide a good introduction to this new work by the eminent anthropologist, ethnohistorian, and Iroquoianist, who set out to write this book “about the importance of national sovereignty and of traditional ideal standards of responsible social behavior among the Tuscarora Indians” (p. xiii). It might not be a coincidence that one is hard pressed to see the name, Tuscarora, on the map, as the text asks the reader to quilt together the history of the Tuscarora people and nation, or perhaps of Tuscarora as a place, a reservation, a community, a concept. Readers who expect to find a history of Tuscarora in the conventional sense will be disappointed. This work struck me more as the personal history of Wallace’s relationship with the concept, Tuscarora, with which or whom he has been intimately involved since 1948. It is not only the community who lives in a “Historia” (p. xiii), but also Wallace, and the text is the impressive and thoroughly interesting account of remembering, by both Wallace and the community. As Wallace explains, this book is the result of a collaboration, a reciprocal approach. Community members provided corrections, suggestions, and reviews for this text, which was aimed at presenting “the traditional values and the institutions of the Tuscarora in a positive light” (p. 112). This is not a distant, objective, academic history. It is a text written with a purpose, and it puts forth a proposition: that small, sovereign, indigenous nations can provide the moral ideals needed to regenerate and survive, and that these ideals are their traditional values.
Disciplines
Publication Date
September, 2013
Comments
2013 H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences Online.
Citation Information
Sebastian Braun. "Book Review: Tuscarora: A History by Anthony F.C. Wallace" (2013) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sebastian-braun/7/
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