Owóknage: The Story of Carry the Kettle Nakoda First Nation by Čega K’inna Nakóda Oyáde (“Carry the Kettle First Nation” in the Assiniboine/Nakoda language) is a comprehensive history of the Assiniboine people, edited by Jim Tanner, David R. Miller, Tracy Tanner, and Peggy Martin McGuire. The Carry the Kettle Nakoda First Nation is a community originating from Nakoda and Assiniboine peoples, whose homelands span across the settler-defined Canadian-U.S. border near Montana, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and North Dakota. The book is a result of a collaborative effort from Carry the Kettle community members, Twin Rivers consulting, and extensive research and archival work from the editors. In the first part of the book, they use historical settler sources, such as trader accounts and governmental reports, and then frame these accounts with Assiniboine community interviews from 1929 and 2015. The second half of the book mostly uses the 2015 narratives from Elders. The publisher explains that the project derived from a prior land-use study, which is why the book has a variety of sources. This book sets out to frame and position Nakoda histories by providing precise and extensive information, as the events and actions that happened previously provide context for Nakoda lives today. Creating a book as an intentionally collaborative project challenges the status quo in scholarly works on Indigenous histories.

The first part of the book, titled “Ne Wanágaša Owóknaga” (“The History of the Nakoda People”), spans eight chapters and details the nation’s settler-colonial experience over hundreds of years. It starts off with pre-contact understandings of the origins of the Nakoda people, using both creation stories and archaeological evidence. This beginning does a good job of centering the Nakoda people’s foundations upon their cosmological traditions; it’s important for Indigenous communities to be grounded in their oral traditions in scholarly works, as too often an Indigenous community's entire history is academically constructed by biased colonial writings. The first part of the book goes into meticulous detail about the various displacements of the Nakoda people, particularly from their Cypress Hills homelands, as well as the calculated methods by the US and Canadian governments to weaken and subsequently commit genocide against the Carry the Kettle people.

In the second part of the book, titled “Nakón Wičóha Iyamé I nagu Wošbebi” (“Spirituality and Traditional Hunting and Gathering”), the focus turns to traditions, detailing sacred ceremonies, burials, language, boarding schools, hunting, medicine, diets, land use, and environmental health. This part of the book is centered on lived experiences, environmental relationality, and current concerns of community members. Elders provide extensive information about the traditions passed down by their relatives, including an insightful discussion on medicinal hunting and gathering and its ties to Nakoda spirituality. The second section ends with various Elders giving their advice to Carry the Kettle youth, as Elders hope Nakoda values and traditions will continue to guide their community members in subsequent years.

In contemporary scholarly writing concerning Indigenous communities, terminology and diction are often subject to scrutiny. It is important to use the decolonial and conscientious terms that the Indigenous scholars of the field have established. This book has a few segments that are not careful in decolonial diction. For example, in the first chapter, the word “prehistory” is used to categorize the pre-contact lives of the Nakoda people: “we have endeavored to reconstruct their prehistory based on the archaeological record.... Before written records and non-Indigenous observations, there is evidence of human occupation in this area” (7). This volume has other instances of oversight in its diction, such as understating genocide as “inappropriate treatment” (4), but these words don’t undo the benevolence of this project overall.

Overall, this book does excellent and thorough research to inform the work as a collaborative project. Interviews with Nakoda Elders throughout the book creates space for valuable narratives, and positions them justly as a high level of truth, since settler-colonialist accounts have been placed above oral traditions for centuries. The Carry the Kettle First Nation clearly appreciates its histories being told correctly. As Chief Elsie Jack states, “Our hope is that our First Nation members and families, Elders, educators, leaders, governments, libraries, industry, private sector, and others will find this study beneficial in learning about the strength and pride of the Carry the Kettle First Nation” (xiv).

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[Review length: 709 words • Review posted on April 12, 2024]