Chapter 12 - Afterword

Summary

I began this volume by noting the disconnect between widespread and long-standing views of the indigenous people and environment of the Great Plains and the reality of the character and history of that region. Mounted bison hunters like the ones we often visualize did live on the grasslands, but they existed for little more than a century and a half and many of the most famous groups who lived this way migrated to the Plains during the Colonial Era. Focusing on them neglects not only the farmers who dominated the Plains for a millennium but also the diversity of hunter-gatherer ways of life that people have lived there for perhaps 15,000 years or more. Like human history throughout North America, human history on the Plains is not a story of an unchanging way of life fixed for centuries in the forms that Euroamericans encountered; it is a story of constant change and interaction between human beings and the region’s potentials and limits. It is also a story that is difficult to understand without thinking about how Plains people reached out beyond the grasslands, establishing social and economic connections that spanned much of North America.