Reasoning Togetheris a diverse and often engaging work that covers a range of issues from networks between 18th and 19th century Native writers through debates over authenticity and identity to community awareness and literary criticism and political action. It includes a variety of voices, male and female, and perspectives, all sharing the commitment to theorize experience by rooting Native literature and criticism in real life experiences and collective histories. To the credit of those who contributed to the volume, it does not shy away from political expression. Neither does it attempt, or accept, an academic distancing or “objectivity.” It refuses neutrality openly and without apology, an approach that is courageous and all too rare in the current period of post-9/11 campus re-action and de-politicization. At the same time this is an honest politics, geared towards justice and the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, rather than a cynical or easy posturing or opportunism. It does not sacrifice judgment or scholarship.

Among the most compelling and incisive chapters is Sean Teuton's fine invocation of the centrality of political writing to both scholarship and Native liberation struggles. Teuton reflects on his own experiences as a graduate student working with American Indian prisoners. He argues that moving beyond the walls that divide by class and education is perhaps the most empowering, and necessary, activity an indigenous intellectual can engage in. Likewise, the political transformations in indigenous literary traditions have also been necessary, as experiences of colonial subjugation have informed intellectuals' ideas, theory has been united with practice. For Teuton, these intellectual traditions of historically engaged political writing introduce a theory of Native praxis (106).

This demand for justice, that informs and underpins Native critical traditions, Teuton terms “the callout.” Tracing the callout through resistance over the generations, Teuton stresses his view of political activity as fundamental to knowledge production. Crucially, the callout is expressed in the classroom, the prison, the street, the community. At the same time the intellectual or academic must work to overcome the barriers that can divide and separate.

Also of note is Cheryl Suzack's examination of the interconnections between gender relations and community relations. She does so to understand sites of collective identity formation and political action as well as social positions that help explain how relations of power change within American Indian communities (172). Suzack provides a compelling reading of Winona LaDuke's work as an expression of the insistence on the unity of feminist literary politics and cultural and political alliances. Suzack seeks to restore gender identity as a key category in discussions of tribal politics and community values, by examining how American Indian feminist critics have theorized relationships between community and gender identity and collective agency in order to create oppositional spaces.

There are also some significant problems with the overall volume. This claims to be a “collectively authored” volume that breaks free from the constraints and limits (aesthetic and political) of “individual literary representation.” Yet this claim is illusory, not at all realized by the actual text. Rather this is a quite conventional anthology which collects separate and distinct works by individual authors and gathers them together under one broadly and diversely themed volume. Incredibly there is not even a co-authored article here. Even the claim that this is an “interactive work” in which each essay comments on the other is not even remotely borne out by the actual text. While some chapters do refer superficially to others in the collection this is not maintained throughout the volume and most chapters make no real connection to others in the collection. The minimal responses to individual chapters remain individual rather than taking the form of a collective conversation, addressing shared themes in a mutually engaged manner.

Even more the work is dominated by the voice of one contributor, Craig S. Womack, whose voice is clearly privileged over the others (and whose name appears alone above the others on the book's cover. Reasoning Togetherbegins with a bulky essay by Womack. At 101 pages this essay is almost a book unto itself. Incredibly, in all of this the author devotes only a couple of pages to discussing the other contributions to the volume, and then only in the context of paragraph length sketches of what follows, including two paragraphs on his own concluding chapter. In fact, together with the 57 page concluding chapter it means that Womack's voice accounts for more than 40 per cent of this “collective” work's content. The situating of these chapters at the beginning and end also means that Womack is granted both the opening and closing word.

The collection is also at times curiously unsituated. Fully one-third of the authors currently teach at institutions within the Canadian state. Yet there is little engagement with specific histories, politics, cultures and practices of colonialism and anti-colonialism marking the Canadian and US states.

There is certainly a need for a collective conversation on the issues identified in this volume and the intentions of the collection's contributions raise the necessity of a paradigm shift in Native literary criticism and criticism in general. Unfortunately, despite the hopes raised, this is not the collection to effect or present that necessary conversation. Readers should know this going in.

At the same time, taken as a standard anthology, this remains a useful and compelling work on different levels. It offers important rewards, even if these are less than they might have been. It will prove particularly interesting to upper level undergraduates and graduate students versed in debates and theories of criticism. At the same time it should find an audience beyond academia as well and indeed is a text that might strike a chord with community advocates and academics alike.

While recognizing and questioning the limitations in structure, voice and emphasis that do serve to weaken the work, keeping it from living up to its own stated aims, it must still be said that this is an exciting, challenging, forceful and compelling work. It is one that inspires the reader to look further, and to ask more and deeper questions. It calls upon the reader to rethink links between our own theory and practice, our own engagement with history and our own place in current struggles.

This is a work that, in its own words, sides with the “literally and symbolically disenfranchised” (409). It locates the heart and soul of activist scholarship in a commitment to the powerless but does not do so uncritically or superficially. It refuses “a series of affirmations of all things Indian,” moving engagement into “the arena of contested power struggles” (409). It challenges communities to resist their own oppressive realities (such as anti-gay marriage amendments being passed by some tribal governments).

Reviewed by Jeff Shantz, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver, B.C.

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