Shadow Tribe

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.

"Fischer's history is meticulous and nuanced, fully acknowledging the complex social and political currents within and around these 'renegade' Indian communities…. Fischer combines the skills and perspectives of a historian and an anthropologist. As a historian, he extracts surprising details from archival documents… Fischer also has ferreted out oral histories recorded by individual Columbia River Indians telling their stories in their own words, making this history more ethnographic, more faithful to all those caught up in this history."

"An engaging and compelling narrative, Shadow Tribe, engages legal, cultural, and political history as well as religion, colonization and resistance, and the sociology of identity formation. By complicating the 'narrative of confinement and isolation' that has dominated popular understandings and representations of Native American life, Fisher makes a thoughtful and informative addition to the long history of Indian Removal and Native American cultural persistence."

"Shadow Tribe takes us into the heart of the legal and cultural conundrums stalking Columbia River Indians, and the result is a subtle, empathetic portrait of people struggling to harmonize nature, tradition, and community in a time and place where nothing is neat and clean."

"The book is an engaging account of the history of Columbia River Indians and their determination to maintain control of their identity though confronted by overwhelming obstacles. Summing up: Highly recommended."

"He treats two significant but often neglected themes with great clarity: first, the status of off-reservation Indian communities . . . and second, the related and important topics of racial categorization and communal identity building in these off-reservation areas."