Ruth Phillips’s study of souvenir art made in the Northeast describes a number of histories of longstanding, transcultural negotiation among the native and nonnative people in this region. Although the dynamic forces at work in the contact zone have been described as reciprocal before—Arjun Appadurai (1996) has aptly described the negotiation of imagined lives as “self-fabricated” and James Clifford (1997) has characterized the roles of native movers and shakers (formerly called informants) as active ones, forged by people who have “been around”—Phillips’s feat in this book is to link these notions with cases, so that we may now understand the complex postcontact construction of Aboriginal identity in the Northeast to have been affected by many series of specific transactions among native people, Victorian ladies, missionaries, and military men among others. The whimsies, wall pockets, and model canoes that they have left behind both in private collections and in museum storage facilities result from these cross-cultural processes, and Phillips deftly informs us that the forms, stylistic characteristics, and materials that may be observed in these objects were traded and transcribed by these parties in a fascinating succession of exchanges. The very nature of these arts, however, as hybrid and “impure” (it...