In this widely acclaimed book from Yale University Press’s Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and Modernity, Reid, of Snohomish Coast Salish ancestry, offers a rich history of the maritime world of the Makah people. The Sea Is My Country illustrates the ways in which the Makah shaped the economy of the Northwest Coast while also maintaining their ancient relationships to both sea and land. So far this term, we’ve seen collaborations with a clan and an individual; now we will be reading a work created in close relationship with a nation.
Although we have read much about power dynamics, particularly the desire to or the implementation of inscribing “imperial corridors” on Indigenous spaces and bodies, this is, I think the first book we have read that is explicitly about Indigenous power, space, and sovereignty. The actions of Tatoosh and his people paint a pretty clear picture of Makah power over marine spaces, countering the dominant narratives that often focus on land and clear demarcations premised on land use and fixed space. My question is what unique opportunities did the marine space/ecology of the Makah territory to Chief Tatoosh and others and how did those work to serve the Makah expression of sovereignty, particularly in the case of the initial run in with Meares and Co?
Hi all – a couple lingering questions and thoughts!
It strikes me that Reid is making an intentional effort to use historical understandings of power relations between imperial/colonial entities (e.g. borderlands, specific languages of sovereignty, property, and title) to describe Makah power relations with other distinct Indigenous people and non-Natives (which might very well be the best representations – don’t get me wrong!). (It seems this was in part, to argue that the Makahs are not “in the past” or “Ecological Indians,” when they reclaim their whaling practices, but are, as they have always been, oriented towards a “moditional”—a modern with traditional practices—future.) I wonder what others thought about this approach – is this, in a way, attempting to “legitimize” Indigenous forms of diplomacy, exchange, and violence as “modern”? Do we need to do this type of framing to understand Indigenous power relations? What are the benefits and drawbacks of this sort of work? What might this strategy suggest about Reid’s intended audience(s)?
This book stands in stark contrast to the last two books we’ve read (Standing Up and Written As I Remember It). What do we make of these differences (for example, Reid speaks primarily of a collective group of people, while the others discuss particular individuals and families)? In what ways are these distinctions gendered – and how do we read this difference? What does Reid’s approach offer that the others do not, and vice-versa?
I had similar thoughts, Nicole – Reid seemed to be responding to/in dialogue with western historical constructs (eg. decline narrative, etc.). I wondered about this need for refutation vs. the history standing as valid on its own, and whether Reid approached this with a decolonising praxis, or as an attempt to correct an inaccurate historical interpretation.
One of my colleagues in the Education department commented the other day that “there are no innocent conversations about race.” I wonder whether these words can be extended to our own work in the history department: “there are no innocent conversations about colonialism” and even, “there is no innocent research”. What do we think, then, about a book like this that is seeking to do important/decolonising work (as the community has acknowledged) but seems very firmly grounded in mainstream/western historical traditions of researching and writing histories? I’m also going to raise the perhaps loaded question, do non-Indigenous/outsider researchers bring different insights to Indigenous research?
After reading the last two books, and experiencing the ways they use oral history, I was struck by the more traditional historical use of oral history in Reid’s book. Did anyone else notice that? Have our perceptions of what is good oral history changed after the last two weeks? Is Reid doing good oral history?
This maybe sounds more critical than I meant it…
Perhaps it would be better to talk about the differences in the approaches. Thoughts?
Hi all,
Sorry for my delayed response, I was out of commission all day yesterday with what felt like the head cold of the century. When will winter end?
To sort of riff off of several of your questions, I was very interested in Reid’s explicit (and implicit) references (or possible lack thereof) to his own methodology when researching and writing the book. For example, the forward outlines the approval for the project by the Makah community (I won’t get into how we might problematize community in this question), and the introduction discusses why he feels the need for this research to be done, but overall I felt like he didn’t spend much time reflecting on his specific methodology and its implications. What can we take from this? How does this affect his message?
To expand on this question, what type of comment might this make about authority? Specifically, I’m thinking about his writing style of weaving together information from historical sources and then cleanly summarizing it with a sentence or two that really hits home. This system may lend itself well to predatory reading (while reading I kept on thinking what great quote these sentences would make for a research paper), but does he have the authority to make these statements? Does anyone? How does this relate to the disciplinary tradition of history/historical writing overall (I don’t know and I’m really curious).
This is a side comment, but I was nervous about getting through the whole book before I had to pass it onto the next person, so I bookended it while reading it: I read the first two chapters, then the last two chapters, then jumped around throughout the middle. I thought this system would be confusing, but I think it added further clarity and context to the overall narrative. I know we’ve talked about the idea of chronologies and time progression already, but perhaps it would be good to revisit it in our discussion of Reid’s book and to compare and contrast it with the other texts we’ve read.
Hi Vicki, I had similar thoughts and wrote in my response that I would have valued some more explicit positionality and methodology – but I do wonder if this was because this was a published book intended for a wide audience vs. what he included in his PhD thesis (which I had found online and now lost so haven’t been able to go back and check) where he might have been more explicit about this?
By examining how the marine borderlands inhabited by the Makahs were sites of per-existing conflicts and expressions of sovereignty that were changed by contact with Europeans, not produced by it, Reid emphasizes the agency of his protagonists. I’m curious how this examination of agency is different from the agency we have found in books like Standing Up and Written as I Remember It. Does this agency, which is positioned as a corrective to narratives that characterize indigenous peoples as passive victims of trauma and colonization, look different when seen from the vantage of a more “traditional” methodological approach?
Hi all!
Apologies for the late response. It seems I drew the short straw and was only able to access a copy of the book this afternoon! That said, I have a few questions that might echo (or hopefully add to) some of the previous queries here.
In the first chapters, the discussion of powerful chiefs and leaders such as Maquinna, Wickaninnish, and Tatoosh, and their control over sovereign territory, trade with Europeans, and resistance to imperial encroachment at first struck me as a sort of masculinist focus. But I wonder how there might be a political and academic utility in Reid’s rendering of these nations (Clayoquot, Makah, etc) as unified, sovereign, and powerful as (or even more than) Spanish and British units in the area? Nicole mentioned the possibly gendered dimensions of Reid’s focus too, so this question/comment is partially in response to that.
More broadly/thematically, I’m interested in Reid’s insistence on productive power throughout the text. For example, chapter two focuses on the generative power of violence against and among Indigenous groups, (though, as Reid points out, violence is not a settler-colonial intervention), and the final chapters of the book discuss the “positive consequences” brought by the racist backlash against Makah whaling in the 1990s. What can Reid’s research and interpretation in this work reveal about the subtle and counterintuitive ways that power can be productive? Conversely, what might be some of the risks in the argument of “good things” coming out of bad situations?