Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. Honolulu: Unversity of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. ix, 319 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9780824891824.
War at the Margins offers a globe-spanning survey of the experience of Indigenous peoples during the Second World War and the long-term impacts of these experiences on their communities and the eventual rise of an international Indigenous political movement. The term “margins” does triple duty in Lin Poyer’s study, referencing the lightly populated fringes of empire or states inhabited by small-scale “tribal” people, several of which became combat zones; the marginal political status of most Indigenous people prior to and during the war; and, finally, the near invisibility of Indigenous people in histories written after 1945. The war, of course, was hardly marginal for the people whose ancestral territories became combat zones and/or who were recruited from Indigenous communities to serve as soldiers, labourers, and trackers, along with many other key roles. Since the 1980s, a growing body of scholarship has been published on the war experiences of Indigenous peoples, including Poyer’s own pioneering work in Micronesia. To my knowledge, this book is the first attempt to draw these diverse materials together.
Poyer opens with a short introduction, setting out the framework for the volume. She notes that the contemporary term “Indigenous” is “anachronistic to some degree” (5), but this is justified given her goal of tracking the long-term implications of the war for the later development of Indigenous rights movements. Acknowledging the fierce debates over Indigenous identity, she suggests that these can be put aside for the purpose of the study. Despite her broadly inclusive use of “Indigenous,” Poyer’s analysis swings between the quite distinctive experiences and concerns of minority aboriginal communities within nation states, which were largely outside of the battle zones, and those within prewar colonial empires, which in many cases saw violence on their ancestral lands. The introduction is followed by 13 thematic chapters, arranged in a rough chronological order. Poyer has read deeply in the vast historic, archival, and ethnographic record of Indigenous experiences of war. While she draws broadly, she focuses in particular on the experiences and words of Indigenous peoples who experienced the war in the South Pacific, the Burma-India borderlands, and the northern fringes of Finland and Lapland as well as Indigenous communities drawn into the war from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Japan.
The following nine chapters follow two overlapping tracks covering the war years. The first details the widespread impacts of the military invasions of European and Japanese forces of Indigenous homelands. In particular, Poyer discusses the Indigenous perception and reception of foreign fighters, the recruitment of local peoples into the war effort, the suffering experienced due to fighting and food shortages, population displacements, and the destruction of local environments combined with the rapid buildup of infrastructure, among other topics. The second track takes a wider view of the interactions and mutual perceptions between the metropolitan and colonial governments waging war and the subject Indigenous populations. Here Poyer examines how the ambiguous political status of Indigenous people at once motivated and shaped their participation in the war. In settler colonies like Canada and the United States, participation in the military offered Indigenous people a route towards full citizenship and governments with (misplaced) bragging rights about “equality.” Common stereotypes associating Indigenous people with wildness were at once reinforced and complicated as militaries employed local people as guides, scouts, and trackers, taking advantage of their knowledge of the land and bushcraft and, in the famous case of Navajo codetalkers, their language.
“Wartime experiences,” Poyer observes, “simultaneously integrated Indigenous communities more fully into national and global societies and stimulated awareness and defense of culture” (195). In the final four chapters, Poyer’s survey demonstrates a shift from the first of these processes to the second. The first decades following 1945 witnessed a resumption and expansion of fighting in much of Southeast Asia as postcolonial struggles for independence were subsumed in proxy Cold War competitions. Where fighting didn’t occur, the great powers took advantage of remote (for them) lands for military exercises and, most devastatingly, nuclear testing. Meanwhile, the former combatant nations embraced policies aimed at the complete assimilation of minority Indigenous populations. The war years, however, had reinforced a sense and pride in Indigenous cultural distinctiveness. The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of national and transnational movements by Indigenous people asserting their identity and rights. The war can only be understood as a precursor to these later developments. Yet, in one of the most interesting chapters, Poyer explores how central the war experience remains for many Indigenous communities in a variety of ways: the honouring of veterans and high rates of military service; robust oral traditions about experiences during the war; and involvement in the conservation of war sites and promotion of tourism.
This is an immensely rich and rewarding book. I cannot begin to do justice to the wide range of topics, incidents, and people Poyer discusses nor to the sincerity, clearness, and passion with which she writes about people and communities she obviously admires. That said, the book is not without challenges. The master category of “Indigenous” deserves more detailed attention than a few paragraphs in the introduction. While Poyer uses the term inclusively, her survey consistently illustrates major differences in the situations and experiences of indigenous minorities within combatant nation states and the small-scale agrarian societies whose lands were subsumed by war within the wider colonial empires. Poyer’s decision to construct the book as a series of thematic comparative essays rather than a synthetic history leads to some repetition in her key case studies but more significantly means that the book will be the most useful for readers who come to it with some prior knowledge of the war across its theatres. Such challenges, however, are inevitable. War at the Margins provides a treasure-trove of information and insights that deserves wide readership from scholars and the public. Very fortunately and generously, the electronic version has been made available as an open access download.
John Barker
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver