Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific
Northwest's Columbia River Indians -- the defiant River People whose
ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in
central Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional
accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story
illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and
the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light
of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering
presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes
down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American
colonization.
Based on more than a decade of archival research and conversations with
Native people, Andrew Fisher's groundbreaking book traces the waxing and
waning of Columbia River Indian identity from the mid-nineteenth through
the late twentieth centuries. Fisher explains how, despite policies
designed to destroy them, the shared experience of being off the
reservation and at odds with recognized tribes forged far-flung river
communities into a loose confederation called the Columbia River Tribe.
Environmental changes and political pressures eroded their autonomy
during the second half of the twentieth century, yet many River People
continued to honor a common heritage of ancestral connection to the
Columbia, resistance to the reservation system, devotion to cultural
traditions, and detachment from the institutions of federal control and
tribal governance. At times, their independent and uncompromising
attitude has challenged the sovereignty of the recognized tribes,
earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as radicals and
troublemakers even among their own people.
Shadow Tribe is part of a new wave of historical scholarship that
shows Native American identities to be socially constructed, layered,
and contested rather than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his
vantage point on the Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study
that uses regional history to broaden our understanding of how Indians
thwarted efforts to confine and define their existence within narrow
reservation boundaries.
