Educational and enlightening. A compelling read that illustrates one woman's story as its own allegory for defining an "American" identity. Easy to read and just long enough to make the author's points salient-defining self in context of other, historical (and by extension contemporary) appropriation of agency by religion, and faces of feminist perspectives. ( )

In the early 1850s, Olive Oatman was a typical girl heading west on a wagon train full of Mormons in search of gold and God. By the end of the decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, torn between two cultures. Orphaned at fourteen after her family was massacred by Yavapai Indians in northern Mexico (now southern Arizona), Oatman spent a year as a slave to her attackers before she was traded to the Mohaves, who tattooed her and raised her as their own. Four years later, under threat of war, the Mohaves delivered her back to the whites in exchange for horses, blankets, and beads. This much is true. But the fine points of Oatman's transformation from forty-nine to white savage have been replayed in countless books and articles - modern and Victorian - that read like Rashomans of revisionist history and romantic conjecture.

Interesting look at one persons life and attitudes about race and gender during the 1800s. ( )

Olive Oatman and her sister were taken by a Native American tribe while her family was heading west in the early 1850s. Olive lived among them for 5 years before being returned to white society. The story is interesting, and I learned a good deal about some of the Native American tribes in the southwest at that time. The information on Olive, however, is sketchy at times only because there isn't a lot of documentation. There are unanswered questions that I had that will remain unanswered because of the passage of time. The other historical information that was shared was dry at times and struck me as being an attempt to lengthen the book. I did get lost in some of the names. It was an interesting enough read about something I knew nothing about. ( )

In the 1850s, Olive Oatman and her younger sister, Mary Ann, were taken captive by Native Americans in what was then New Mexico Territory. Most of the rest of their family was killed in what became known as the Oatman Massacre, Mary Ann later died of illness, and so Olive lived for a few years by herself among the Mohave people. She seems to have become part of the Mohave to a great extent, most vividly through the tattoos which give this book her name: the lines on her chin, common to many Mohave women, which Olive also bore. After a few years, Olive was ransomed back to the US government, and she became the subject of one of the melodramatic Indian captivity narratives so popular with white Americans.

Oatman's story is an interesting one, but Margot Mifflin doesn't quite do justice to it, and certainly doesn't do justice to the broader history of which it is part. I'm no specialist in American history, but even I could tell that Mifflin repeatedly fails to truly confront Euro-American settler violence and colonialism. Much of the historiography she draws on is dated, and is overwhelmingly grounded in a white perspective. (More than once I blinked at some of the quotations she used to begin chapters, generally dropped in without qualifier or context.) Mifflin claims to more accurately represent the cultures and histories of the Yavapai and Mohave peoples than have previous recounters of the Oatman , but often does so in language and via framings that seemed to me queasily close to the nineteenth-century Noble Savage narrative.

Essentially, this is pop history masquerading as a scholarly work, only thinly rooted in more rigorous work, and it's eyebrow-raising to me that it was published by a university press.

(Unlike what a number of other GR reviews state, there is no anti-Mormon/LDS agenda here—Mifflin is just not writing from a Mormon/LDS perspective. There is a difference.) ( )