This fine volume highlights ways of writing indigenous history beyond the usual frameworks supplied by academia. The authors seek to “decolonize indigenous narratives with the very same tools we have inherited from colonialism” (p. 220), to encourage more intense collaborations between indigenous and nonindigenous academics and activists, and, ultimately, to make indigenous ways of knowing “part of the knowledge that everyone seeks out” (p. 15). Less successfully, the volume draws the experience of indigenous Pacific Islanders into the purview of the Americas. The book stemmed from a 2005 conference entitled “Narrating Native Histories” and inaugurated a book series from Duke University Press of the same name that has since published several monographs by the contributors.
The tools of colonialism — alphabetic writing, legal and archival codes, treaties, and the like — are the stuff of which most indigenous history is made. J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Riet Delsing decolonize this material...
