Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, “Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after Civil War” (UNC Press, 2012)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Dec 13, 2012 · 1h 11m

Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic. As historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa masterfully relates in his new book Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Native and non-Native reformers developed a host of viable policy alternatives to allotment and forced assimilation in the post-Civil War years.

Seizing the ferment of Reconstruction…