Native American Historiography
The victors of war always control the writing of history, forging and fixing exactly how events will be represented, remembered, and studied. This is particularly the case in American historiography because the narratives of the nation's development have been so thoroughly interested in denying empire and erasing the resistance of those peoples who were swept aside by conquest.
Indeed, many American history books still attest that the nation's territorial expansion was motivated by benevolence, by an Anglo Protestant civilizing mission to rescue and uplift racialized savages, even denying genocide, calling it by a more genteel name "Indian removal," and asserting that there was little opposition to American rule.
Native Americans and their history have interested Indians and non-Indians alike—from colonial times through the end of the twentieth century. And, judging by the outpouring of public and private support for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004 across the lawn from the Capitol, this interest continues to flourish. There is a robust, diverse literature discussing Indians and their history. It has deficiencies and limitations, but overall, it is strong enough to satisfy many areas of inquiry in an informative and appealing manner.
"Historiography” is not the study of history. Instead, it is the study of the writing of history. The way in which an individual, a people, or a nation writes its history reveals much about those who wrote it. The past itself does not change, but the way that people interpret it does. The elements of history that are emphasized or downplayed, and the value judgments assigned to them, all change—reflecting the writer’s own personal and cultural biases.
Of course, Native American history is subject to these historiographical shifts. In fact, it can be argued that no character in the pantheon of American historical figures has been cast and recast, interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted more frequently than the American Indian. For example, popular depictions of Native American history from the nineteenth century have an Anglocentric perspective. Writers narrated the country’s history from a White American perspective, often celebrating America’s “winning of the West” with the national self-confidence characteristic of the era. It was deemed a “good” thing that American civilization overspread the continent and supplanted the less developed, “savage” native inhabitants.
In contrast, the 1960s witnessed a significant historiographical shift in how America viewed its past. The civil rights movement drew attention to the often difficult plight of ethnic minorities in America; the anti-war movement depicted the U.S. military not as defenders of freedom but as imperialist aggressors; the environmental movement forced people to contemplate alternative lifestyles that were less destructive of nature; and the hippies rejected traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant values and attempted to create an alternative culture.
Those who interpret the past are often influenced by the social, cultural, and political issues of their own time, and these issues often prompt them to reconsider long-held assumptions within the context of those newly-arisen issues. Not surprisingly, the changes of the 1960s influenced historians, writers, film-makers, and other Americans—causing them to view Indians in an increasingly sympathetic and favorable light. They perceived Indians as a historically-oppressed minority victimized by imperial conquest and as a dignified, peace-loving people who lived harmoniously with nature. Furthermore, they became increasingly critical of Europeans, Americans, and the United States government. Over-dramatizing things a bit, some people replaced the old understanding of “White man good, Red man bad” with “Red man good, White man bad.”
Revising history like this challenges people to contemplate the past from new — and often provocative — viewpoints. However, replacing one simplified stereotype with another doesn’t necessarily lead to better understanding. Nevertheless, after a wave of revisionism has run its course, historians often find themselves in the enviable position of being able to blend the best of the old with the best of the new, and produce more nuanced, thoughtful scholarship. This is p recisely where today’s historians of Native America find themselves, and they have produced some first-rate Indian histories.
Still, there remain significant limitations to understanding Indian history. The most notable is the problem of written sources. Native American peoples, up until the nineteenth century or later, were generally pre-literate. They transmitted memories of the past orally — but famines, wars, and diseases extinguished not only people, but Indian histories as well. Consequently, centuries of Indian history have been irretrievably lost. Furthermore, during the contact and post-contact eras, many of those who documented Indian life — trappers, traders, missionaries, explorers, travelers, government officials, and scientists — were of European descent, and their writings reflected White cultural biases and interests. Although the Indians may have been the subject of these writings, the writings often reflected a non-Indian perspective.
One solution to the dearth of written sources is “ethnohistory.” Ethnohistory, which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, is a methodology that blends anthropology and history. It encourages its practitioners to use historical sources to answer anthropological questions and, conversely, to use an understanding of a culture and its dynamics to answer historical questions.
What results is not necessarily “history from an Indian perspective,” but rather a history that is sensitive to a tribe’s culture. In the second half of the twentieth century, scholars increasingly employed ethnohistorical methods to produce commendably sophisticated studies.
The shortage of histories from an Indian viewpoint has been slowly but steadily remedied as time has progressed. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries native peoples either created texts of their own or allowed their testimonies to be transcribed by others. And, in the last several decades, greater numbers of historians of Indian descent have written their own histories, and are enriching the field of Indian history by adding long-absent native voices.
When studying any area of history, first-hand accounts provide the reader a level of understanding and a certain “feel” that is sometimes absent from synthetic accounts. Native American history is no exception, and those studying it will benefit from reading these first-hand native accounts.
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