In the 2000s, historians examined the role of Native American identity in history from a different viewpoint. While Brown, Dowd, and Galgano’s monographs focused on identity and its influence on the past the accounts focused on a particular period. Recent histories offer scholars with an overview of a tribe’s history as they examine the transformation of cultural identity's role in the past. Pekka Hamalainen’s The Comanche Empire written in 2008 provides an overview of the history of the Comanche tribe. Hamalainen argues that the Comanche tribe created an empire in the American Southwest. Hamalainen’s investigation of Native identity and culture contrasts with Dowd or Galango histories. While the author examines aspects of the Comanche’s religious …show more content…
Fenn provides historians with a monograph on the Mandan people. Using archeology reports, personal accounts, and secondary sources, Fenn provides historians with a comprehensive history of the Mandan’s past. In the narrative, Fenn argues that the Mandan’s history provides an “alternative view” to America’s past. Her approach to history is similar to Hamalainen as Fenn looks at several periods of the tribes past to identify the Mandan’s culture. Fenn revisits Brown’s interpretation of history by illustrating how the Mandan’s culture transformed through European and Anglo-American contact. Focusing on the early history of the tribe, Fenn agrees with Hamalainen that the “nomadic” Shoshones were among the first to interact, fight and trade with the Mandan. Examining the outside forces that interacted with the Mandan, Fenn offers historians with an insight into the factors that transformed the tribe’s culture. To support her claims the author investigates the impact that horses, goods, and European disease had on the tribe. Examining horse’s introduction to Mandan culture, Fenn uses archeology reports on the Double Ditch to show that the buffalo in the area became scarce because of “horseback …show more content…
Fenn expands on Hamalainen’s argument that European goods offered Native Americans with a “super rich” society and economy. Concluding her history, Fenn provides historians with the insight to how contact with Anglo-Americans brought on the demise of the Mandan natives through disease and westward expansion. To demonstrate the decline of the Mandan culture, Fenn explains that with European contact the population of the Mandan shrank causing the natives to become “refugees.” Exploring the concept of the decrease in Mandan population, Fenn raises the question of how European diseases led to a transformation in native culture. Concluding her history of the Mandan natives, Fenn states that European illness “virtually destroyed the” natives culture with the extermination of the population. Fenn’s research provides historians with a perspective on how native tribes faced cultural transformation through contact with European Americans and other outside influences. Agreeing with many of Hamalainen and Brown’s arguments on culture, Fenn’s narrative on the Mandan natives enables historians to raise new questions on the native perception of American
In the document “Doomed to Perish”: George Catlin’s Depictions of the Mandan by Katheryn S. Hight, she analyzes the work of George Catlin while he traveled to the Mandan colony west of the Missouri River. Hight identifies that Catlin created a false and imaginative depiction of the Mandan Indians based on his social and political ideas which ended up creating an entertainment enterprise rather than reporting history. Catlin’s extravagant depictions of the Indians, which did have an impact on the Indian Policy in America, seemingly motivates Hight to write on this subject.
The English took their land and disrupted their traditional systems of trade and agriculture. As a result, the power of native religious leaders was corrupted. The Indians we...
When considering the birth of America, most people look to Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock. In An Infinity of Nations, Michael Witgen looks to shed light on the role Native Americans played in the formation of early America. Witgen analyzes the social relationships between the European settlers and the indigenous tribes of the Anishinaabeg and the Haudenosaunee in order to tell the story of the westward expansion of early American civilization. Witgen depicts agreement and conflict between the colonizing groups while also explaining the formation of power within them – but his analysis is incomplete. The incorporation of Joan Scott’s and Michael Foucault’s definitions of gender and power relationships into
Dr. Daniel K. Richter is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. His focus on early Native American history has led to his writing several lauded books including Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past, and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Richter’s Facing East is perhaps, a culmination of his latter work. It is centered from a Native American perspective, an angle less thought about in general. Through the book, Richter takes this perspective into several different fields of study which includes literary analysis, environmental history, and anthropology. Combining different methodologies, Richter argues Americans can have a fruitful future, by understanding the importance of the American Indian perspective in America’s short history.
This book is complete with some facts, unfounded assumptions, explores Native American gifts to the World and gives that information credence which really happened yet was covered up and even lied about by Euro-centric historians who have never given the Indians credit for any great cultural achievement. From silver and money capitalism to piracy, slavery and the birth of corporations, the food revolution, agricultural technology, the culinary revolution, drugs, architecture and urban planning our debt to the indigenous peoples of America is tremendous. With indigenous populations mining the gold and silver made capitalism possible. Working in the mines and mints and in the plantations with the African slaves, they started the industrial revolution that then spread to Europe and on around the world. They supplied the cotton, rubber, dyes, and related chemicals that fed this new system of production. They domesticated and developed the hundreds of varieties of corn, potatoes, cassava, and peanuts that now feed much of the world. They discovered the curative powers of quinine, the anesthetizing ability of coca, and the potency of a thousand other drugs with made possible modern medicine and pharmacology. The drugs together with their improved agriculture made possible the population explosion of the last several centuries. They developed and refined a form of democracy that has been haphazardly and inadequately adopted in many parts of the world. They were the true colonizers of America who cut the trails through the jungles and deserts, made the roads, and built the cities upon which modern America is based.
Hämäläinen goes on to explain that his purpose is to trace and analyze the contradictions of the Plains Indians’ horse culture, rather than just condemning it as something baleful, which many historians tend to do. Hämäläinen also refutes the common eastern farmer-western nomad manner of analyzing Plains equestrianism, in which there is “a tendency to cast the villagers as cultural reactionaries who failed to embrace the liberating powers of equestrianism and, locked in space and time, were crushed by the double invasion of the aggressive nomads and the encroaching Americans,” (Hämäläinen, 2) and instead proposes that Plains horse culture is understood from a latitudinal --rather than longitudinal-- viewpoint, since horse culture spread from the south, northwards. It is also explained that the latitudinal spread of equestrianism gave rise to the creation of markedly diverse horse cultures, vary...
The article, “Native Reactions to the invasion of America”, is written by a well-known historian, James Axtell to inform the readers about the tragedy that took place in the Native American history. All through the article, Axtell summarizes the life of the Native Americans after Columbus acquainted America to the world. Axtell launches his essay by pointing out how Christopher Columbus’s image changed in the eyes of the public over the past century. In 1892, Columbus’s work and admirations overshadowed the tears and sorrows of the Native Americans. However, in 1992, Columbus’s undeserved limelight shifted to the Native Americans when the society rediscovered the history’s unheard voices and became much more evident about the horrific tragedy of the Natives Indians.
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
The author starts the chapter by briefly introducing the source in which this chapter is based. He makes the introduction about the essay he wrote for the conference given in at Vanderbilt University. This essay is based about the events and problems both Native Americans and Europeans had to encounter and lived since the discovery of America.
The Kickapoo Indians are Algonkian-speaking Indians, related to the Sauk and Fox, who lived at the portage between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, probably in present Columbia County, Wis., U.S., when first reported by Europeans in the late 17th century.
Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.
The average British citizen in America during the 17th Century had a preconceived notion of Indians as savage beasts. However, before the arrival of the British, the New England Indians, specifically the Wampanoag tribe, lived a harmonious and interdependent lifestyle. Conflict among the Wampanoag was limited to minor tribal disputes. The war methods of the Indians were in fact more civilized than the British methods. The close living quarters of the British and Indians forced the Indians to adopt aspects of British civilization in order to survive, such as the ways of warfare. Douglas Leach in his book Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in the time of King Philip's War argues that British influence on Indian society turned the Indians from savage to civilized. This paper will argue that British influence turned the Indians from civilized to savage. The examination of Wampanoag behavior from before British influence through King Philip's War proves that Wampanoag beliefs became more materialistic, that land ownership became important, and that unnecessary violence became a part of their warfare.
Pages one to sixty- nine in Indian From The Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal by Dennis McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb, provides the beginning of an in-depth analysis of Native American cultural philosophy. It also states the ways in which western perspective has played a role in our understanding of Native American culture and similarities between Western culture and Native American culture. The section of reading can be divided into three lenses. The first section focus is on the theoretical understanding of self in respect to the space around us. The second section provides a historical background into the relationship between Native Americans and British colonial power. The last section focus is on the affiliation of otherworldliness that exist between
Native American’s place in United States history is not as simple as the story of innocent peace loving people forced off their lands by racist white Americans in a never-ending quest to quench their thirst for more land. Accordingly, attempts to simplify the indigenous experience to nothing more than victims of white aggression during the colonial period, and beyond, does an injustice to Native American history. As a result, historians hoping to shed light on the true history of native people during this period have brought new perceptive to the role Indians played in their own history. Consequently, the theme of power and whom controlled it over the course of Native American/European contact is being presented in new ways. Examining the evolving
In Thomas King’s novel, The Inconvenient Indian, the story of North America’s history is discussed from his original viewpoint and perspective. In his first chapter, “Forgetting Columbus,” he voices his opinion about how he feel towards the way white people have told America’s history and portraying it as an adventurous tale of triumph, strength and freedom. King hunts down the evidence needed to reveal more facts on the controversial relationship between the whites and natives and how it has affected the culture of Americans. Mainly untangling the confusion between the idea of Native Americans being savages and whites constantly reigning in glory. He exposes the truth about how Native Americans were treated and how their actual stories were