This book is an exploration of how American Indian autobiographers' approaches to writing about their own lives have been impacted by American legal systems from the Revolutionary War until the 1920s. Historically, Native American autobiographers have written in the shadow of "Indian law," a nuanced form of natural law discourse with its own set of related institutions and forms (the reservation, the treaty, etc.). In Sovereign Selves, David J. Carlson develops a rigorously historicized argument about the relationship between the specific colonial model of "Indian" identity that was developed and disseminated through U.S. legal institutions, and the acts of autobiographical self-definition by the "colonized" Indians expected to fit that model.

Carlson argues that by drawing on the conventions of early colonial treaty-making, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian autobiographers sought to adapt and redefine the terms of Indian law as a way to assert specific property-based and civil rights. Focusing primarily on the autobiographical careers of two major writers (William Apess and Charles Eastman), Sovereign Selves traces the way that their sustained engagement with colonial legal institutions gradually enabled them to produce a new rhetoric of "Indianness."

After ten years as a foreign and military policy lobbyist in Washington and four as director of an interfaith lobby, Gretchen Eick, moved to Kansas, earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas and became Professor of History at Friends University. She was awarded two Fulbright Scholar awards, teaching in Latvia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and a Fulbright Hays to South Africa. Her book on the civil rights movement—Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Right Movement in the Midwest, 1954-1972 (U of IL Press, 2001/2007) won three awards: The Richard Wentworth award from the University of Illinois as the best book in American history that press published over two years, the University of Kansas’ Hall Center Award for the best book by a Kansas author (the first time the award went to someone not teaching at K.U.), and the William Rockhill Nelson award for the best nonfiction book by a Kansas or Missouri author. The book resulted in two museum exhibits, a 2009 Telly Award-winning public television documentary about the first successful student-led sit-in, the 1958 Dockum Drug Store Sit-in in Wichita, and mention in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.