Our Indigenous Native Americans

Watkins is upfront about what this book is: 'a collection of pictures, maps, stories, and a poem or two, to help paint as accurate a picture as I can.' Judged as a scrapbook-history rather than a scholarly monograph, it delivers exactly that, and delivers it with real generosity of scope — Choctaw code talkers, Ute origin poetry, the Great Race legend across Suhtai, Lakota, and Cheyenne tellings, Joseph Medicine Crow's raid on fifty SS horses ('singing a traditional Crow honor song as he rode'), and Elizabeth Penney Wilson's work preserving nimipuutimt. Few single-author volumes stitch together this many tribes, regions, and centuries in one binding, and the author does the unglamorous work of naming sources — Wikipedia, the National Park Service, individual submitters like Henk Sparreboom and Aaron Shakespear — so a curious reader has a trailhead into further research.

Where the book earns its second axis is in the moments Watkins steps out from behind the clippings and speaks from his own life. The passage on his summer as a BLM firefighter working alongside Eskimo and Athabaskan crews — burying meat under tundra to keep the smell from bears — is the one stretch of true first-person world-building in the manuscript, and it's good enough that you wish there were ten more like it. The dedication, too, does real work: 'Perhaps we can acknowledge some wrongs, and even correct them?' is a modest, sincere frame for what follows, and the admission that 'my research has made me humble as I learn more about what I don't know' is the right note for a book built from other people's scholarship.

This is not an argument-driven history — the structure is associative rather than built, and the prose is mostly other people's prose, quoted and unedited. But as an act of assembly and stewardship — bringing lesser-known figures like Elizabeth Penney Wilson, Chief Flying Hawk, and the Choctaw Code Talkers into one place next to the famous names — it succeeds at what it set out to do.