Angie Debo: Pioneering Historian (Volume 18)

Oklahoma Western Biographies #18

by Shirley A. Leckie

The daughter of Oklahoma sodbusters, a student of Edward Everett Dale, and a Protegee of Frederick Jackson Turner, Angie Debo was an unlikely forerunner of the New Western History. Breaking with the followers of Turner, Debo viewed the westward movement of European Americans as conquest rather than settlement. Her studies on the Five tribes presented the Native American point of view and incorporated ethnological insights more than a decade before ethnology emerged as a separate field. Shirley A. Leckie’s biography of Debo is the first to assess the significance of Oklahoma’s pioneering historian in the historiography of the American Indian, the writing of regional history, and the development of national law and court cases involving indigenous people. Leckie sheds light on Debo’s family’s background, her personality, and the impact of gender discrimination on her career. Finally, Leckie clarifies why Debo became a scholarly pioneer and, later, a "warrior-scholar" activist working on behalf of Native Americans during a period of changing Indian policy.

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leckie's biography of Angie Debo (1890-1987) is unusual in that it was to some degree inspired by a film instead of the other way around. A fuller account of Debo's story is well worth the telling if for no other reason than that Leckie is able to sand down the edges of some of the more extreme claims made on Debo's behalf in Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo, the 1988 PBS film produced by Barbara Abrash and Martha Sandlin. (Debo herself unintentionally helped create one serious inaccuracy in the film by implying that her beloved mentor, Edward Everett Dale, had prevented her best-known work, And Still the Waters Run, from being published by the University of Oklahoma Press.)

Leckie's biography is sympathetic without being uncritical, and the author notes how Debo's independent thinking may have hindered as well as advanced her career. Debo was a life-long diary keeper, and Leckie makes good use of those many volumes in this biography that is sensibly, if not excitingly, written. I would have preferred less about Debo's foreign travels and her reactions to news events and more about her religion, which is treated cursorily even though Debo both served as a Methodist lay pastor and opposed missionary activity on the reservation.

[Nancy Cook-senn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed examination of her early life, education, influences, writings, and her legacy.