[A] strong work of psychobiographywell researched, written, and illustrated. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. - D. Steeples, Choice
Joel Pfisters study of the career of Henry Roe Cloud makes a useful and insightful contribution to the growing body of knowledge about the group of American Indian intellectuals and activists whose careers flourished in the early part of the twentieth century. . . . Roe Clouds career offers a study not of adaptation but of a specifically American kind of self-determination, in this case through a canny awareness of the crucial significance of class. - Lucy Maddox, American Historical Review
[A] commendable study. . . . Pfister has drawn heavily on the extensive Roe Cloud correspondence in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to construct a convincing analysis of Roe Cloud's education, which he aptly deems a cross-cultural encounter (p. 99). - Margaret Connell Szasz, Journal of American History
The real value of this book, it seems, is that Pfister is a talented cultural studies scholar who offers a new framework for understanding Henry Roe Cloud. Further work on Roe Cloud will benefit immensely from the The Yale Indians conceptual framework. - Francis Flavin, Ethnohistory
The Yale Indian advances a project begun in Joel Pfisters Individuality Incorporated and also breaks new ground. This book, based on archival research, is about the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) Henry Roe Cloud (18841950), the first full-blood Indian to graduate from Yale (BA 1910, MA 1914). Mostly overlooked by historians, in his era he was recognized as one of the greatest Native leaders. Roe Cloud expanded the meaning of Indian, in part by striving to develop a university-trained professional and managerial class of Native people at a time when the Carlisle Institute was educating Indians to work on Fords assembly lines. This is a rich and important book.Arnold Krupat, author of Red Matters: Native American Studies
A provocative anatomy of the privileges and penalties of an elite early-twentieth-century liberal education for one accomplished Native American, Henry Roe Cloud, the Yale Indian of the title. Drawing upon a rich array of Roe Clouds personal and professional correspondence as well as published papers, Joel Pfister lays bare the effects of powerful and mutually sustaining operations of Indianization, individuation, sentimentalization, spiritualization, professionalization, and bureaucratization on Roe Clouds life course and chances. In the process, he brilliantly illuminates Roe Clouds strategic and successful self-fashioning as a classed, raced, sexed, and gendered modern subject at a particular place and time. As Indian-White history, The Yale Indian also extends and deepens our sense of the productivity of private life in forging and maintaining what Ann Stoler has termed the tense and tender ties of U. S. Empire.Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism
[A] commendable study. . . . Pfister has drawn heavily on the extensive Roe Cloud correspondence in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to construct a convincing analysis of Roe Cloud's education, which he aptly deems a cross-cultural encounter (p. 99). -- Margaret Connell Szasz * Journal of American History *
[A] strong work of psychobiographywell researched, written, and illustrated. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- D. Steeples * Choice *
Joel Pfisters study of the career of Henry Roe Cloud makes a useful and insightful contribution to the growing body of knowledge about the group of American Indian intellectuals and activists whose careers flourished in the early part of the twentieth century. . . . Roe Clouds career offers a study not of adaptation but of a specifically American kind of self-determination, in this case through a canny awareness of the crucial significance of class. -- Lucy Maddox * American Historical Review *
The real value of this book, it seems, is that Pfister is a talented cultural studies scholar who offers a new framework for understanding Henry Roe Cloud. Further work on Roe Cloud will benefit immensely from the The Yale Indians conceptual framework. -- Francis Flavin * Ethnohistory *