SOURCE: A review of American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, in Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 16, No. 2, March, 1987, pp. 157-59.

In the following review, Cornell traces the policy issues addressed in Deloria's American Indian in the Twentieth Century.

Vine Deloria introduces this valuable new collection[, American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century,] with the observation that the last few decades in Indian affairs have seen substantial progress. This progress, he argues, has been in the formulation of Indian policy, where Indian input is greater than it has ever been. Whether or not policy outcomes actually have improved remains, as these papers indicate, a complicated question.

Indian-white relations generally have been viewed as just that: relations between two more or less monolithic groups in which the interesting events happen where the two meet head-on, as they continually do. It is the strength of this book that it often abandons this...