Brian K.

Carnaby
20 December 2013
History 891
Dr. Warren
Recent Trends in Amerindian Historiography: A Review Essay
Introduction
For the still inchoate American republic, Indian policy dominated the 19
th
century.
Various answers arose, from removal to the West to extermination to acculturation and
assimilation. Yet finding a final solution evaded the most ambitious of BIA agents and social
reformers. Indeed many of the solutions (especially relocation) in turn created further Indian
problems, including environmental degradation, poverty, and alcoholism to name a few. Yet an
understanding of 19
th
century North American history is incomplete without an appreciation of
the roles indigenous peoples played. Native peoples and their histories are fundamental to
understanding how North American societies and people have changed over time. The essay that
follows discusses a series of major works that have significantly shifted the discourse on the
history of native peoples.
The historical and geographical scope of this essay is quite broad; however, the emphasis,
when possible, is on late 19
th
and early 20
th
century. The reservation era and the rise of the global
capitalist state are of particular importance. Whenever possible, the geographic scope has been
limited to the trans-Mississippi West, although I have sprinkled in works about indigenous
groups east of this boundary.
Native American history, for a large period of the historical profession, has been a bit of
an oxymoron. Native Americans have often been viewed as outside of the frame of history, seen
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as timeless and as a part of nature. Yet a distinct historiography, with major phases and
bookended by pivotal works (from both within and without the academic/professional world),
can be discerned. These phases and the works emphasized in this essay are to a certain degree
arbitrary. In a historiographical essay on Native American history in the broadest of senses, my
selections of works must be arbitrary. Nevertheless, I have tried to focus on works that have
challenged major assumptions and continued to be cited and read widely today. This has entailed
focusing mostly on the last thirty years after the rise of New Indian History. Each phase has
added certain insights as well as devolved into particular intellectual traps and misconceptions,
an important aspect of the discursive traditions inherent in historical scholarship. The major
historiographical orientations to Native American history that will be focused on this essay are as
follows: The Turnerian Frontier and Early Ethnography, Ethnohistory, New Indian
History, Indigenous Scholarship, Integrative Indian Histories, and Indigenous Peoples and
the Environment. My thesis is that these discursive shifts have promoted new ways to imagine
indigenous history outside the dichotomy of civilization versus savagery that has formerly
dominated U.S. West historiography.
The Turnerian Frontier and Early Ethnography
While this review essay will focus primarily on major shifts in Native American
historiography in the last forty years, it is important to note a few foundational works that more
recent literature has been attempting to challenge. The most important of any works that have
informed and influenced historians assumptions about the West in general and native peoples in
particular is Frederick Jackson Turners frontier thesis. The New Indian School as well as
New West historians have been refuting the Turner thesis for at least forty years, yet the
continual need to mention and refute his ideas underscores their vast influence. In short, Turner
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argued that American democracy and American character was formed through the frontier
experience. Emphasizing the process of the frontier line moving west, the hero of this saga was
the intrepid pioneer, the yeomen farmer, and the mountain man.
While Turner mentions Indians twelve times (either in a generic sense or a specific
sense), they form merely a part of the Western backdrop for his narrative. Much like the
Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, or the Great American Desert, Indians are at most an
impediment to progress and more often exotic scenery. Furthermore, the nomadic, buffalo
hunting Plains Indian stood in place for all Indians, and the annuity or reservation Indian was of
little interest in the sage of Western expansion. In the Turnerian paradigm, courageous Euro-
Americans conquered the savage, settled the West, and in turn created the American republic. As
Donald Fixico reiterates, Indians were not imperative to the development of the country.
1

Turner, and many scholars that followed him, believed that the frontier had disappeared and with
it the Indian presence. Even if Indians played the role of the savage to be conquered in the West,
their role in American history, and certainly historiography, would be negligible from 1893
onward.
2

This is not to say that the Indian question had been resolved and shelved away. For
anthropologists, ethnographers, reformers, and the federal government, the Indians past, present,
and, most importantly, future would still be studied, yet more often than not from a Eurocentric,
paternalistic approach. Thus, as reformers went to work civilizing the savage through education
and assimilation throughout the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries, ethnographers, biographers, and

1
Donald L Fixico, Call for Native Genius and Indigenous Intellectualism, Indigenous Nations Studies Journal
2
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ;For scholarship on trans-
Mississippi West Indians from the early 20
th
century see Walter Prescott Webbs The Great Plains (1931) and The
Great Frontier (1964). Webbs work shows a more mild Turnerian interpretation of indigenous peoples. While he
goes to great lengths to elucidate the culture and lifestyle of wild Indians, the tendency to see Native Peoples as
static, primitive, and timeless still predominates in narratives focused more exclusively on White settlers and
ranchers in settling the West.
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anthropologists went to work collecting and observing native peoples many were certain would
disappear all too soon. While early ethnography and anthropological field work had its faults, a
few works stand out for their rare ability to attempt to cross the cultural divide and let natives
speak for themselves (even if through the scholarship of white men and women). Yet many
indigenous intellectuals have scoffed at this corpus of paradoxically ethnocentric ethnography. I
have thus focused my attention on two writers that attempted to understand native peoples from
their own worldviews and those that have been well regarded in retrospect by indigenous
peoples.
Nebraskan poet laureate John Neihardt is an excellent starting point. Part poet, part
philosopher, part amateur historian and ethno-biography, Neihardt wrote on a variety of topics
dealing with the U.S., endeavoring to preserve and express elements of an idealized pioneer past.
Yet he also demonstrated an interest in preserving the memories of indigenous peoples, even in
their words and from their own perspectives. His most famous and instructive may be Black Elk
Speaks. Published in 1932, Black Elk Speaks [as told through Neihardt] relates the stories of
Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man. Based on conservations between Neihardt and Black
Elk (with his son, Ben Black Elk acting as interpreter), Neihardt proliferated Black Elks
spiritual views to a wider (red and white) audience. Indeed, Black Elk Speaks, along with Joseph
Epes Browns When the Tree Flowered and The Sacred Pipe, would come to form the basic
works of a modern pan-Indian theological tradition. As Vine Deloria Jr. explains in a foreword,
the books most surprising effect upon the contemporary generation of young Indians who have
been aggressively searching for roots of their own in the structure of universal reality.
3
While
the work has been criticized as not accurately representing Black Elks views by some, his

3
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2004), xv.
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efforts to explicate an alternative worldview from a Lakota elder showed the ways in which
literary works outpaced historical scholarship in thinking more critically about indigenous
peoples in the first half of the 20
th
century.
Fellow Nebraskan, Mari Sandoz, also represents a novelist-turn-ethnographer that
attempted to cross a cultural divide and present a Sioux history from a Sioux perspective (and
present it to a wide White audience). In Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, Sandoz
avoided deifying and simplifying Crazy Horse and the Oglalas. Instead, Sandoz attempts, as
Vine Deloria explains in an introduction to the 2008 reprint, to look deep into the hearts of the
people to create a more critical, dynamic, and nuanced picture of the Northern Great Plains in
the mid-19
th
century.
4
Sandoz emphasizes inter and intra-tribal conflict and appreciates the
intricate divisions of Sioux tribes into their respective bands and families. For a work first
published in 1942, her ability to blend Western European narrative techniques with a native
perspective is truly impressive. Her works greatest strength, the immense amount of
ethnographic work done to collect oral histories from elders at Pine Ridge, is also its greatest
complication. The emphasis on oral histories contributed to her harsh treatment of Red Cloud, as
jealousy and strife amongst reservation leaders can still be witnessed in Sioux politics today.
While not necessarily a fundamental flaw, this underscores the reticence of traditional/academic
scholars to heavily rely upon oral histories colored by contemporary concerns of the orator.
5

Regardless of ones assessment of the viability of oral histories, her hard work in constructing a
historical biography of Crazy Horse from an Oglala perspective/worldview helped water the

4
Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), vii.
5
The concern over a lack of traditional, text-based sources is one of many reasons why some academic historians
have continued to be reticent to study native peoples. Perhaps this is why the academic study of indigenous peoples
has been dominated by anthropologists and ethnographers and not historians. Path breaking female historians like
Sandoz were notable exceptions to this rule. Also useful is Angie Debos And Still the Waters Run: the Betrayal of
the Five Civilized Tribes (1940). Debos work explicated the corruption, duplicity, and criminal activity that
dominated white administration and allotment policy.
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dormant seed that would blossom into Ethnohistory, New Indian History, and Indigenous Studies
in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
6

Ethnohistory
Writing indigenous history, more than any other field perhaps, requires blending
contrasting methodologies, worldviews, and perspectives.. One of the most crucial steps towards
doing this is combining academic archival/textual research with oral history gained from natives
perspectives. This can also mean blending differing conceptions of time, place, reality, and
truth/knowledge. In many ways, the traditional linear historical narrative is at odds with native
cyclical understandings of time and history. The relatively new methodological approaches of
ethnohistory are useful to achieve a balance between two distinct paradigms. The process of
completing field work, collecting oral histories, and finding ways to gel native perspectives (that
means in their own words) with an academic historians analysis and archival documentation is
certainly challenging and time consuming. Yet an ethnohistorical approach is absolutely essential
in the study of indigenous peoples.
7

Ethnohistory is described by John R. Wunder as combining the use of archives and
fieldwork to answer the whys, hows, whens, and wheres of culture change.
8
While the blending
of social sciences (especially anthropology) with history is reminiscent of New Social History
and the Annales School, ethnohistory coalesced in the United States after WWII due to
pragmatic rather than scholastic concerns. The field arose primarily out of the study of
Amerindian communities required by the Indian Claims Commission. While the commission was
fraught with controversy over the compensation/claims process, the anthropological research

6
Other works by Sandoz on Native Peoples include Cheyenne Autumn (1953), The Horsecatcher (1957), and The
Story Catcher (1963). Moreover, her masterpiece Old Jules (1935) demonstrates her experiences interacting with
native peoples in North Central Nebraska as a result of her fathers open welcome of indigenous peoples.
7
John R. Wunder, Native American History, Ethnohistory, and Context
8
Ibid., 591.
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conducted throughout the claims process helped revive academic interest in native communities
and led to the foundation of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) in 1954. The value
placed on emic perspectives and the memories and voices of living people in this field helped
invigorate the study of indigenous peoples by viewing their forms of history as valid and
essential.
9
Most importantly, it put Indian perspectives and stories at the center of the historical
narrative, emphasizing cultural continuance in spite of conquest, population decline, and pressure
to assimilate.
The emergence of ethnohistory in the postwar climate of the Indian Claims Commission
helped set the foundation for the historical study of Amerindians in their own right (not just as an
extension of Euro-American Western expansion. Eventually ethnographic methodology would
begin to permeate academic historians, contributing to the explosion of Native American
historical works that has come to be described as New Indian History.
10

New Indian History
The rise of New Indian History was influenced by both political agitation outside the
university as well as trends within the historical discipline. The rise of Red Power, the
increasing propinquity of urban Indians, and Pan-Indianism contributed to white politicians,
academics and the general public rediscovering native peoples. This political context contributed
to perhaps the most important discursive shift in Indigenous historiography. Amerindian History,

9
Michael E. Harkin, Ethnohistorys Ethnohistory: Creating a Discipline from the Ground Up, Social Science
History 34, no. 2 (Summer 2010), 113-128.
10
Two of the most influential ethnohistories, on a wide general audience as well as the historical profession, were
Dee Browns Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) and Bruce Triggers essay, Ethnohistory: Problems and
Prospects, published in 1982 in Ethnohistory. Bury My Heart was hugely popular among a variety of readerships.
Browns personal narrative from an Indian-centric perspective fascinated non-Indians becoming increasingly more
critical of the U.S. government past and present. Moreover, as a Western history focusing not on the Battle of the
Little Big Horn but instead on the Massacre at Wounded Knee, it seriously challenged Turnerian assumptions about
the West. While the focus on victimization and a lack of indigenous agency has been criticized, Browns impact on
the academic world was equally profound. Universities scrambled to find qualified Native American historians.
Triggers seminal essay helped define the goals of ethnohistorical research and the need for fieldwork in history.
Trigger discusses the need for engaging with indigenous peoples on the ground level, studying the actual scene,
upstreaming, and learning the dynamic indigenous histories known to elders in their communities.
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as Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. argues, must move from being primarily a record of white-Indian
relations to become the story of Indians in the United States (or North American) over time.
11

While this defines the rise of New Indian History in a broad sense, the specific themes
focused upon have been quite diffuse. Berkhofer suggested to focus on ethnic survival as well as
continuity and change in indigenous cultures. In the face of massive demographic collapse due to
virgin soil epidemics and poverty in the Reservation Era, finding survival in archival sources can
be extremely challenging.
12
With this, the persistence and survival of native peoples and their
cultures replaced white assumptions of the inevitability of assimilation and conquest. As a result,
Indians move to the center of the stage (ideally) and intra and inter-tribal relations become as
vital as Indian-White ones. One of the most important implications of this approach is that Indian
history can be both broadened and narrowed. Clan rivalries on the reservation, among national
Indian leaders, and the hardships of urban Indians all become valuable areas of study. Pre-
contact Indigenous history is also of interest, although one of the most challenging to write due
to the paucity of traditional written sources.
13

One of the biggest conundrums in this new historiographical turn was the dilemma of
persistence versus change in indigenous cultures. The result has been anthropologists focusing
more on persistence with historians paying more attention to change. This dichotomy, along with

11
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The Political Context of a New Indian History, Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 3
(Aug. 1971), 357.
12
For a good introduction to virgin soil epidemics see Alfred Crosby, Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the
Aboriginal Depopulation in America, William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1976), 289-299. For recent critiques
of virgin soil theory, especially the assumption that they caused all but annihilated Indian cultures, institutions, and
religions see Paul Kelton, Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival,
Ethnohistory, 51, no. 1 (2004), 45-71. For a study of indigenous remedies and responses to epidemics, see Kelton,
Cherokee Medicine and the 1824 Smallpox Epidemic, in Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa
and North America (2012).
13
This has meant that pre-contact (often condescendingly termed pre-history) studies have continued to be largely
the purview of popular historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. For an academic survey of pre-contact and
pre-19
th
century indigenous history, see Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West
before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). For a highly influential pre-contact pan-
Indian history see Charles Mann, 1491 (New York: Vintage, 2006).
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conflict versus accommodation, has at times added new ways to study indigenous groups, only to
later hem in possible avenues for research. Nonetheless, the idea of persistence of indigenous
religious beliefs, views of nature, knowledge, and cultural practices has allowed historians to
escape the familiar narratives of conquest and assimilation.
14

In addition to the persistence versus change debate, indigenous agency was another
controversial turn in the New Indian history. As Berkhofer reiterates, even when the historian
thought he was portraying the Indian side in his writing, he adopted implicitlythe white view
of his sources orthe assumption that the outcome of his story was determined more by the
white side than by the Indian side.
15

Another hotly debated discursive turn in this period of new Amerindian historiography
was James Merrells The Indians New World: The Catawba Experience. His overall argument
was that after contact, native peoples were as much immigrants living in a new world as
Europeans or Africans. While certainly not the first to contend that natives lived in a world as
new(i.e. the Bering Land Bridge theory), he offered a novel historical argument that incorporated
indigenous experiences into the mainstream of colonial history. His essay demanded that
historians see native societies as responding and molding historical change, rather than as
timeless and outside of Euro-American history. Although one could critique Merrells
overlapping stages of disease, trading, and settlement which seemed to echo a Turnerian
teleology, his emphasis on native peoples roles in creating new societies, each similar to, yet

14
The focus on Indian survival has often been criticized. One of the most striking critiques is that works focusing on
the persistence of native peoples and their survival obscure the magnitude of tragedy that defines indigenous history
in the 19
th
and early 20
th
century. Some scholars are beginning to temper their
15
Berkhofer, Jr., The Political Context of a New Indian History, 365
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10

very different from, its parent culture was well ahead of its time in incorporating natives as
active players rather than barriers to progress or settlement.
16

Merrells most significant contribution may perhaps have been the idea of an encounter
between worlds can-indeed, must-include the aboriginal inhabitants of America.
17
Moreover,
the idea of commonalities between natives, European immigrant, and slaves in entering new
worlds would be expanded by future historians, most notably Richard White. Yet the common
experience, according to Merrell was one of misery: geographic dislocation, mass death, and
struggles to survive.
18
Yet to Merrell, natives showed remarkable plasticity in adapting to new
situations. Merrells overall conception of the Indians as the dispossessed, the Europeans as the
colonizers, and the Africans as the enslaved, however, seems to totalizing in retrospect.
Historians after Merrell have continue to develop an appreciation for the exceptions to the rule
(free black slave holders in Louisiana, raiding empires of the Comanche, Apache, and Lakota,
etc.). Many native peoples as well as some academic historians reacted harshly to the
implications of seeing native peoples as in a new world. Nonetheless, Merrells scholarship
certainly presented new ways to conceive of the Western Hemisphere post-contact.
19

Yet, despite all of its limitations and heated controversies, New Indian History made a
radical assertion that native peoples were vital to the development of North America. Since the
1970s, indigenous history has become less of a novelty and more ingrained in the academic
establishment, albeit most predominantly in pre-19
th
century American History. Colonial history

16
James H. Merrell, Indians New World: the Catawba Experience, The William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 4
(Oct., 1984), 539.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid, 546.
19
These ideas would be developed further in Alfred Crosbys Ecological Imperialism (New York: Cambridge,
University Press, 1986).
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11

has been imbued with these new perspectives to a degree far outstripping developments in 19
th

and 20
th
century U.S. historiography.
20

For instance, the blossoming of scholarship on King Phillips war is particularly
illustrative of the influence of New Indian History on colonial scholars. Perhaps most notably,
Jill Lepores work The Name of War discusses how native peoples were crucial to the
formation/triangulation of a Euro-American consciousness. Moreover, Lepore elucidates the
persistence of Native cultural forms in native as well as white society well as the end of King
Philips War.
21

19th and 20
th
century U.S. historians were relatively slower to attempt to heavily apply
concepts such as indigenous power, sovereignty, and persistence into native historiography,
partly due to the overwhelming evidence of cultural and demographic loss during these periods.
Writing complex and nuanced narratives, rather than simply declensionist tales of loss, during
the Reservation Era continues to be a major challenge for scholars today.
In attempting to study dependency in new ways, Richard Whites The Roots of
Dependency has initiated another major discursive shift in Amerindian scholarship. Instead of
focusing on military, political, or cultural threats to Indian sovereignty, White emphasizes
ecology. Environments that had easily supported Indian populations for millennia came under
increasing degradation as familiar resources could not support the peoples who depended on
them. The question, again, is why.
22
Explaining why Native American reservations became
third world enclaves in the most prosperous nation (supposedly) on earth was a contemporary as

20
Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Beyond the New Indian History: Recent Trends in the Historiography on the Native
Peoples of North America, History Compass 4, no. 5 (2006), 964.
21
Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philips War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage
Books, 1999), xiv.
22
Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws,
Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), xiv.
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well as a historical concern. How did native tribes become dependent? Turner, ethnohistorical,
and even New Indian perspectives could not adequately answer the question.
For White, it was not simply the result of military pressure, federal policies of cultural
assimilation, or even the totalizing invisible hand of global economics. Answering this question
meant elucidating the reciprocal influences of culture, politics, economics, and the
environment, that all contributed to indigenous dependency at the end of the 19
th
century.
23

White also incorporated and adapted dependency theory to conceptualize the third world
archipelagoes of the American West. Third World scholars, studying Latin America and Africa,
developed dependency theory to understand the unequal results of the rise of global capitalist
systems.
24
American historians gradually came to appreciate the value of global systems theories,
especially dependency theory, to better understand the state of Amerindian Communities since
the 19
th
century.
White became interested in incorporating dependency theory in his study of indigenous
dependency. Applying Immanuel Wallersteins The Modern World System, White attempted to
study how peripheral regions [including Amerindian communities] are incorporated into the
global capitalist system as well as the political, economic, and social distortions that result from
this process.
25
To do this meant moving beyond seeing nation-states as historical actors (a la
Benedict Anderson) but rather as part of larger capitalist systems. This transnational perspective
coalesced with Whites interest in ecologys similar disregard for national geopolitical
boundaries.

23
Ibid., xv.
24
Recent works of scholarship have revived dependency theory to better understand the unequal benefits gained
from global capitalism in the 21
st
century. See Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are
Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
25
White, The Roots of Dependency, xvi.
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13

The growth of trans-national capitalist systems offered White a way to study changes in
native societies over long periods of time and across tribal lines. Indeed, despite all of the
diversity in individual tribes experiences, the rise of the modern world capitalist system
represent a common experience worthy of greater study.
Yet Whites scholarship was as much about critiquing dependency theory as it was
applying it. Understanding how materialist meta-narratives had largely superseded Turnerian
ones, White criticized such explanations for Indian dependency for reducing most human
history to the desperate attempt to cope with too many people and too few resources.
26

In what could easily have been a one-dimensional declensionist approach to Indian
dependency, The Roots of Dependency challenged themes of inevitability and victimization so
common in studies of Native peoples in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries. White appreciated that
Indians took a diametrically opposed approach to resource use in their attempt to maintain
autonomy in the face of ecological loss and change. For instance, Amerindians often avoided
maximizing resource use or farming the most fertile lands. They also selectively appropriated
certain new animals/plants for material, ecological, and symbolic reasons. The use of new
animals and plants happened on a tribe-by-tribe basis and happened due to historical constraints,
an important historiographical contribution of Whites work. He also demonstrated how
indigenous taboos of certain animals developed after contact for a variety of spiritual and
pragmatic reasons.
A study of dependency would seemingly give natives few decisions to make. Yet White
demonstrated how natives showed remarkable flexibility in responding to the havoc wrought by
epidemic disease and market relations with Europeans and Americans.
27
Despite the work of

26
Ibid., 316.
27
White, Roots of Dependency, 317.
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14

Crosby in Ecological Imperialism and Virgin Soil Epidemics to elucidate the portmanteau
biota that Europeans had as allies in their conquest of the New World, disease could not alone
explain native dependency. The destructions of subsistence systems would prove pivotal in
Indigenous groups eventual subjugation. Horticultural-hunting societies facing these
catastrophes were a narrow set of strategies to cope. None proved completely effective in
balancing the physical survival of their communities with the urge to preserve their traditional
ways of life and cultural practices. Natives had roughly three options to combat dependency,
according to White:
1) Natives could try to maintain their existing subsistence strategies largely unchanged.
2) They could try to adapt incrementally to changing ecologies within existing homelands.
3) Last, indigenous groups could attempt purposeful modernization, which meant the
acceptance of modern technology as well as modern social organization and values.
28

Indigenous groups across North America (and the globe) tried a balance of all three. Inter and
intra-tribal strife complicated attempts to organize a concerted plan to combat dependency.
Studying changes in native cultures and communities as they combated dependency continues to
offer ways to appreciate the tragedies of Native American history without denying indigenous
peoples agency in historical narrative.
Moving beyond the forlorn topic of indigenous dependency, Richard Whites most
celebrated work, The Middle Ground, shifted discourse by elucidating an era of white-Indian
cooperation and cultural exchange. While Whites previous work, The Roots of Dependency,
attempted to trace the complex contingencies that created Native dependency and poverty, The
Middle Ground continued to shift discourse beyond Turnerian conceptions of subjugation.
29
In
focusing on more nuanced interactions between natives and Europeans in a world where neither

28
Ibid., 320-321.
29
Whites The Roots of Dependency was also vital for its cross-tribal case studies of Choctaw, Pawnee, and Navajo
struggles to maintain sovereignty in the face of cultural, demographic, and perhaps most importantly ecological loss.
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15

had the upper hand, Whites work has completely changed the climate in which contemporary
and future historians write indigenous histories. Although White was making a historically
specific argument about the precarious imperial-Indian alliance systems in the Great Lakes
region in the mid 18
th
century, historians have taken the middle ground idea and ran with it.
Many historians have search for evidence of middle grounds in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries
(often to no avail). While some might say the middle ground thesis is only applicable to the time
and place of Whites monograph, the emphasis on approaching Indian history with an eye to
more complex relationships than simply conflict versus accommodation (or persistence versus
change) is undoubtedly one of the most significant shifts in historiography in the last twenty
years. The Middle Ground also argued for studying native peoples at the village and family level.
While not the first to do so, Whites work helped proliferate these ideas to a wider academic
world. Plenty of scholars have heaped praise on Whites The Middle Ground. What is important
to understand, historiographically speaking, is that the Middle Ground thesis has fundamentally
changed the academic climate of Indian history. Much like Turner, all historians have to assess
in their monographs the degree of cross-cultural exchange that occurred between whites and
other groups. What the fixation on The Middle Ground does, unfortunately, is sometimes obscure
the rise of scholarship by indigenous people that equally revolutionized Native American
historiography.
Indigenous Scholarship
Crucial to the emergence of new perspectives in Native American historiography is
Amerindian history by Amerindian scholars. Native peoples have always passed down stories of
their origins, but the increasing number of indigenous peoples entering academia has allowed
their ideas to proliferate at a much more rapid rate. Sadly, this very idea (that natives have to
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16

enter the academic world to be heart by historians) speaks to the ethnocentrism of the western
scientific/academic mind. Nevertheless, the increasing number of Native Americans graduating
with PhDs and entering the academic world demonstrates the rise of indigenous agency within
the academic world.
30
The rise of reservation universities further elucidates the ways in which
indigenous peoples blend academic and indigenous forms of knowledge/worldviews. At the
same time that native peoples are attempting to indigenizing the American University system,
many scholars from indigenous backgrounds are critiquing Western scientific and historical
forms of knowledge.
31
This type of scholarship is deeply imbued with firsthand experience of
extreme poverty on reservations, the proliferation of discrimination and stereotypes, and
continual efforts to gain autonomy for their people.
Vine Deloria Jr. is an excellent starting point for the massive corpus of indigenous
intellectual works on Indian history.
32
We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf attempts to
challenge what he calls a cameo theory of history, where Indians come onto the stage briefly
only to fade quickly into the din. Cameo approaches to Amerindians have pre-dominated since
before Turner and continue to dominate secondary and post-secondary history coursework. With
Delorias typical biting wit, he aptly characterized a large segment of Amerindian historiography
that takes a basic manifest destiny white interpretation of history and lovingly plugs a few

30
For a recent look at Indigenous intellectualism and differing cultural conceptions of genius/intellect: Donald L.
Fixico, Call for Native Genius and Indigenous Intellectualism, Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 1, No. 1
(Spring 2000), 43-59.
31
For challenges to the paradigm of Western academic scholarship see Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Angela
Cavender Wilson, eds., Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities
(Lincoln, NE, 2004); Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (Lincoln,
NE, 2003); and Vine Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden,
CO, 1997).
32
There is a massive body of literature by Native Americans for Native Americans. A much lengthier review essay
than this could be written solely on this. The works of Vine Deloria as well as his son Philip Deloria offer an
excellent starting point, though, to the scholarship by indigenous peoples. For a lengthier exposition of indigenous
scholarship see, Native Historians Write Back: Decolonizing American Indian History, edited by Susan A. Miller
and James Riding In (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011). For indigenous scholars in ethnohistory see
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books,
2012).
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feathers, wooly heads, and sombreros into the famous events of American history.
33
Other
works by Vine, especially his first work Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, play
off white guilt as well as denigrating white efforts to remedy the plight of the Indian. More
recent indigenous works recognized among a wide public readership as well as academic
historians include his sons Phillip J. Delorias Playing Indian, which argues that white
Americans used the idea of the Indian to construct a national identity (and idea reiterated in 1999
by Lepore in The Name of War).
Integrative Indian Histories
In addition to the wider influence of indigenous intellectualism, scholars in the last ten
years have begun to study native peoples and their relationships to (and as) wage laborers, other
ethnic groups, blacks, whites, etc. Many are also beginning to examine the often neglected and
misunderstood experiences of native women in the changing worlds of the 18
th
, 19
th
, and 20
th

centuries. Albert Hurtados Indian Survival on the California Frontier is one work of scholarship
that attempts to continue the New Indian tradition of illuminating indigenous survival and
persistence as well as explore new topics such as Indians as wage laborers and Indian family life.
He also studies Indian sexuality, a still inchoate and exciting topic of future research.
Other scholars are studying the commonalities between free Blacks and native peoples in
the age of re-education in the early 20
th
century. For example, Kim Warrens The Quest for
Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880-1935 explicates
the complex racial and social hierarchies and relationships that developed when blacks and
Indians interacted. She also argues that African American efforts to establish agency in education
allowed for cross-cultural fertilization that influenced both the Indian rights and civil rights

33
Vine Deloria, Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (Lincoln: Bison Books, 2007), 39.
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movements in the 1950s and 1960s. More work is needed on changing gender formations and
conceptions of masculinity and femininity on reservations across the American West.
Relationships between different ethnic groups and Amerindians are also being studied in
the attempt to integrate Amerindian experiences into wider developments in U.S. history.
Howard Lamar, for instance, discusses how Native Americans on the frontier shared much in
common with black slaves, Aleut contract workers, and Mexican peons.
34
Overall, these
integrative works in Amerindian history demonstrate the bright future for nuanced scholarship on
native communities as they changed in the late 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries.
Indigenous Peoples and Environmental History
In the past five years, one of the most promising trends in Amerindian historiography is
in the field of environmental history. This includes studying native peoples and their
relationships with ecology but also utilizing spatial analysis to better understand the worlds that
native peoples lived in. Regarding spatial analysis, Pekka Hmlinen Comanche Empire is
particularly noteworthy. Hmlinen inverts the conquest narrative, explicating the rise of a non-
European empire on the plains in the late 18
th
century that revolved around pastoral subsistence
economies, slave and wheat raiding, and a loose, egalitarian political structure. This recent work
furthers the idea of Indian-centric scholarship that moves past declensionist narratives. Indeed
the very nature of the Comanches empire, with its egalitarian leaderships and porous boundaries
challenges our conception of what an empire should or does look like.
While the power of such a work as this cannot be discounted, one wonders whether the
Comanche empire is an exception to the rule of Indian subjugation that occurred across the U.S.
West. Although Lakota, Comanche, and Iroquois empires demonstrate Indian regimes
successfully fighting back against White encroachment, one wonders whether this obscures the

34
Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, 211.
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larger picture of eventual subjugation. Indeed, as Hmlinens monograph draws to a close, the
result for the Comanches would be reservation life and annuities just like more accommodating
and semi-sedentary tribes such as the Tonkawa, Iowa, and Osage. Whether or not histories of the
reservation era can be significantly altered to tell stories other than those of decline and tragedy
is a question that weights heavily on scholars. Yet the most powerful idea from Comanche
Empire is the fluctuating balances of power in the U.S. West that preceded the reservation era.
Moreover, in The Comanche Empire, Indian agency does not have to mean rosy depictions of
ecological Indians and Noble Savages. The world Hmlinen illuminates is one based on
torture, kidnapping, and killing, a world where Comanches decimated weaker indigenous tribes
in the creation of their empire. Hmlinens work helps historians recognize the full potential
of indigenous agency and appreciate human fallibility in the actions of Native peoples [that is]
the basis for writing compassionate Indian history.
35

Other works have continued to explore more complex ways to envision Indians as actors
in the historical drama, especially in reference to their interactions with nature. Marsha
Weisigers Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country demonstrates another example of the fuller
potential of indigenous agency. Weisiger argues that the conflict over Navajo sheep raising
demonstrated the failure to create a common ground of understanding between federal
conservationists and Navajo sheep raisers. The failure of each group to establish a middle
ground in range management resulted in a serious degraded ecosystem, one that both groups
held culpability in denigrating. To this day many Navajo people view conservationists and
environmentalists with disdain, a result that seems so at odds with American conceptions of the
ecological Indian. A historiographical world where Indians are not proto-environmentalists is

35
Pekka Hmlinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 360.
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beginning to take shape, and represents one of the best examples of seeing Indians as agents but
through a more critical lens.
The work of debunking and demystifying scholars understandings of Indigenous
relationships to nature is one of the most exciting sub-fields of Amerindian research. Recent
scholarship on indigenous knowledge, especially in Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment
in Africa and North America (2012), edited by David M. Gordon and Shepard Krech III, shows
that scholars are working across disciplines to better appreciate the nuances in indigenous views
of the natural world.
Conclusion
While the past few years have witnessed an explosion of inter-disciplinary scholarship on
indigenous people, the challenge still remains how to tell stories more dynamic that simply those
of declension in the lives native peoples. While the emphasis on indigenous perspectives and
agency continues to offer value in this regard, recent critiques of indigenous agency illustrate the
limits of this line of analysis to the field. Perhaps the continued exploration and experimentation
outside of Western historical methodologies and narratives can yield new ways of envisioning
Native history. Moreover, the emphasis on more critical approaches to indigenous agency,
especially in relation to the environment will continue to yield promising avenues of study.
Regardless, the Indian Question, will not be dissipating in the near future.





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