Native Acts

“Native Acts is an important and thoughtful challenge to the political position that ‘tradition’ is an acceptable rationale for excluding those whom the politically powerful deem ‘non-traditional.’” - Jo Carrillo, Great Plains Research

“Barker’s book is a provocative examination of the social and historical context in which some Native nations have equated cultural authenticity with legal legitimacy.... This book is a bold statement. Despite its theoretical density, any scholar, native activist, or student who is contemplating the meaning of sovereignty, self-determination, and the processes of decolonization for Native peoples must read this book.” - Kelly M. Branham, PoLAR

“Native Acts is a brave, engaging, and important book. Joanne Barker gracefully and confidently tackles some of the thorniest issues in Indian Country, from the political and moral consequences of claiming Native authenticity to same-sex marriage, disenrollment, Christian conservatism, and conflicts within and between tribal nations. This is one of the most sensitive, lively, and theoretically sophisticated treatments of the critical questions of authenticity, law, and social formation in all of Native American studies.” - Jessica R. Cattelino, author of High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty

“Native Acts is a significant work with broad appeal across many fields of study with its interdisciplinary approach to legal issues of the politics of recognition, membership, and tradition. The focus on contested histories, notions of cultural authenticity, and battles over legal legitimacy is accomplished with incisive critical analysis and sophisticated theorization. Joanne Barker provides a much needed investigation into race, gender, and sexual politics as they intersect and inflect indigeneity and governance with regard to questions of belonging and exclusion.” - J. Kehaulani Kauanui, author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity

“This is an important study that challenges prevailing ideas about native traditions and cultures and what is authentically native. It invokes a timely call to scholars, tribal leaders, and policy makers to rethink and examine critically how we use terminology and notions that may reinforce social injustice and inequalities inherited from the past.” - Mark Edwin Miller, Journal of American History

"Situating her analysis through categories of family history, personal experience, and multiply constituted identifications that include membership within the Lenape Nation, Barker demonstrates that the personal is political in visceral and historical ways." - Cheryl Suzack, Signs