Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples, Poyer shows, had a distinct experience of WWII, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage.

This book is available open access here.

Lin Poyer is a cultural anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Wyoming.

Holger Droessler is an Assistant Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of empire and labor in the Pacific.

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