Culture, power, and American political policy with respect to Native Americans and African Americans are the focus of the two books under analysis herein: Robin D. G. Kelley’s Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! and Anastasia M. Shkilnyk’s A Poison Stronger Than Love. In Kelley’s book, he makes the case that any culture or race will appear dysfunctional if only its most damaged or criminal members are studied. Most social science analyses only focus on the underclass deviance or culture of poverty in examining African American culture, while the normal black men and women who work and lead middle-class lives rarely find their way into ethnographic texts. As Kelley (1997) writes, “Most social scientists believed they knew what ‘authentic Negro culture’ was before they entered the field. The ‘real Negroes’ were the young jobless men hanging out on the corner passing the bottle, the brothers with the nastiest verbal repertoire, the pimps and hustlers, and the single mothers who raised streetwise kids who began cursing before they could walk” (20). Kelley’s book represents a critique of how the maintenance of stereotypes often meshes with reactionary social policies.
Anastasia M. Shkilnyk’s A Poison Stronger Than Love is actually about two kinds of poison. One is the mercury poisoning of the water and fish that killed members of the Ojibwa village, a disaster that resulted in the forced relocation of the scattered bush communities into one town. Here, we see the breakdown of the kinships, family ties, and love that held the tribes together and were based on ancient tradition. In their place we see idleness, indifference, and alcoholism evolve. The poison dumped directly into the river by Dryden Chemicals may have killed bodies, but the relocation and forced assimilation of the Grassy Narrows people introduced them to a much worse poison of the soul and mind, alcohol. Social devastation has been the result of ...