Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity

In Native Acts Joanne Barker makes a compelling argument that native peoples are only “seen” and recognized as “authentic” within legal structures, racialized discourses, and social constructs that reinforce and reify national narratives and existing U.S. power structures to maintain dependent colonial relations with aboriginal nations. Using thought-provoking case studies, the work illuminates how natives navigate those parameters and explores how notions of the authentic influence relations within and between American Indian communities and tribal status groups (federal, state, and unrecognized). Barker is among a small group of forward-looking scholars who are just now laying bare how concepts and assumptions about native cultural authenticity force presently recognized tribes to reproduce the very social inequalities and injustices (racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and competitive capitalism) that are hallmarks of past and ongoing native oppression. Throughout this stimulating collection Barker calls on native peoples to challenge these discourses, imploring them to undertake a decolonization project that will finally free aboriginal peoples from the binaries that tie sovereign rights to untenable notions of aboriginal primordiality.