Book Review: Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform

Lucy Maddox explores issues of race and progressive reform in the early twentieth century by examining how American Indians positioned themselves to claim a place and a voice in American public life. Maddox focuses on Indian intellectuals, individuals who wrote and spoke publicly about pan-Indian issues arising from federal wardship, and who organized the Society of American Indians (SAl) as a space for disseminating that Indian voice. Responding to an American public that could not comprehend Indian culture and history outside their own mythic and racialized images (often expressed in pageants depicting a savage or vanishing race), this generation of boarding school educated Indians co-opted those performative images in order to reassure whites, even as they negotiated with and challenged them for control of Indian policies. Maddox argues that SAl leaders were not simple assimilationists mouthing social and racial evolutionary solutions to The Indian Question. Rather, they were staking out a distinct middle ground within the reform community, cultivating the idea of Indianness as essential to their adjustment to imposed modern conditions while arguing that their intellectual capability and basic humanity made Indians acceptable citizens