Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T01:43:30.316Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Native peoples in Euro-American historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Wilcomb Washburn  and
Bruce Trigger
Edited by
Bruce G. Trigger  and
Wilcomb E. Washburn
Wilcomb Washburn
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Institution
Bruce Trigger
Affiliation:
McGill University
Bruce G. Trigger
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Wilcomb E. Washburn
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
Get access

Summary

The greatest problem confronting scholars in researching the history of Native Americans is that the written sources for that history derive largely from the non-Native side and are subject to the distortions, misconceptions, biases, and ignorance that are generally associated with history seen from an external cultural perspective. Moreover, the nature of those biases and distortions has varied over the centuries, so that the data from which the historian must draw need to be interpreted with an understanding of those changes. In addition, Native American history shares all the problems of history in general, which, as the British historian Christopher Hill has observed, is rewritten by every generation, not because the past has changed but because each generation asks different questions about it. As a result, historical writing often reveals as much about historians and their social milieu as it does about the objects of their study.

Our knowledge of American Indian history does not depend only on written sources. Oral history, although full of pitfalls, has demonstrated that even through the veil of centuries the Native American past can sometimes be recaptured by the diligent and sensitive researcher. Archaeology is providing increasingly sophisticated evidence about indigenous societies from the earliest appearance of human beings in the New World until the beginning of written records. For more recent times it supplements in many important ways the historical record of changes in Native life as well as providing new insights into specific events, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Nevertheless, the interpretation of archaeological data has limitations and biases that are no less significant than those of written records.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas , pp. 61 - 124
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Axtell, James and Sturtevant, William C., “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (1985).Google Scholar
Axtell, , After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1988).Google Scholar
Axtell, James “A Moral History of Indian-White Relations Revisited,” (1983)
Axtell, James “Colonial America without the Indians” (1987)Google Scholar
Axtell, , “Invading America: Puritans and Jesuits,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beverley, RobertThe History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705)Google Scholar
Brandon, WilliamNew Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500–1800 (Athens, Ohio, 1986).Google Scholar
Clemmer, Richard O. “The Hopi Traditionalist Movement,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18(3) (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifton, James A. “The Tribal History–An Obsolete Paradigm,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3 (4) (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de las Casas, BartoloméBrevissima relation de la destruycion de las Indias (Seville, 1552).Google Scholar
Dickason, Olive P.The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton, 1984).Google Scholar
Dippie, Brian W.The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn., 1982).Google Scholar
D’Souza, DineshThe End of Racism: Principles of a Multiracial Society (New York, 1995).Google Scholar
Dunn, Oliver and Kelley, James E. Jr. (eds.), The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1494 Abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Norman, Okla., 1989).Google Scholar
Eccles, William “Review of Natives and Newcomers,” William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1986)Google Scholar
Friede, Juan and Keen, Benjamin, Bartolomé de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work (DeKalb, Ill., 1971).Google Scholar
Gardiner, Harvey C.William Hickling Prescott: A Biography (Austin, Tex., 1969).Google Scholar
Gardiner, Harvey C. ed., The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott (2 vols., Norman, Okla., 1961), 1.Google Scholar
Geertz, A. W. “A Container of Ashes: Hopi Prophecy in History,” European Review of Native American Studies 3(1) (1989).Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford “Distinguished Lecture: Anti-Relativism,” American Anthropologist 86 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geertz, Clifford in American Ethnologist 16 (1989).
Gill, S. D.Mother Earth: An American Story (Chicago, 1987).Google Scholar
Gorham Palfrey, JohnHistory of New England during the Stuart Dynasty (3 vols., Boston, 1858–1864), 3.Google Scholar
Grinde, Donald A. Jr., The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation (San Francisco, 1977)Google Scholar
Hamell, George R. “Strawberries, Floating Islands, and Rabbit Captains: Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Handlin, OscarTruth in History (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).Google Scholar
Hanke, LewisThe Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, 1949).Google Scholar
Heidenreich, C. E. “Review of Natives and Newcomers,” Native Studies Review 2 (1986).Google Scholar
Hildreth, RichardThe History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent to the Organization of Government under the Federal Constitution, 1497–1789 (3 vols., 1849; rev. ed. New York, 1854), 3:50.Google Scholar
Hill, J. E. C.The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth, 1972).Google Scholar
Hinsley, Curtis M. Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910 (Washington, D.C., 1981)Google Scholar
Hopkins, J. C.The Story of the Dominion: Four Hundred Years in the Annals of Half a Continent (Toronto, 1901).Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology (New York, 1969).Google Scholar
Jackson Turner, Frederick “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893)
Jennings, FrancisEmpire of Fortune (New York, 1988).Google Scholar
Jennings, FrancisThe Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (New York, 1984)Google Scholar
Jennings, FrancisThe Invasion of America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975)Google Scholar
Johansen, and Tooker, “Commentary on the Iroquois and the U.S. Constitution,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990).Google Scholar
Johansen, Bruce E.Forgotten Founders (Ipswich, Mass., 1982).Google Scholar
Kaiser, Rudolph “Chief Seattle’s Speech(es): American Origins and European Reception,” in Swann, Brian and Krupat, Arnold (eds.), Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (Berkeley, Calif., 1987).Google Scholar
Keen, BenjaminThe Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, N.J., 1971).Google Scholar
Keesing, Felix M.The Menomini Indians of Wisconsin: A Study of Three Centuries of Cultural Contact and Change (Philadelphia, 1939).Google Scholar
Koelsch, William A. “A Proud though Special Erudition: Justin Winsor as Historian of Discovery,” ,American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 93, part 1 (1983).Google Scholar
Leach, Edmund review of Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988)
Lyons, OrenIndian Roots of American Democracy (1988).Google Scholar
Martin, Calvin (ed.), The American Indian and the Problem of History (Oxford, 1987).Google Scholar
Mcllwain, Charles H. (ed.), An Abridgement of the Indian Affairs … Transacted in the Colony of New York, from the Year 1678 to the Year 1751, by Wraxall, Peter (Cambridge, Mass., 1915).Google Scholar
McNeill, , Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986).Google Scholar
McNeill, William H. “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” (1985)
Meltzer, D. J. “The Antiquity of Man and the Development of American Archaeology,” in Schiffer, M. B. (ed.), Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory (New York, 1983), 6.Google Scholar
Mooney, JamesThe Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Washington, D.C., 1896).Google Scholar
Murdock, George P.Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History (New York, 1959).Google Scholar
Novick, PeterThat Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parry, John H.The Age of Reconnaissance (Cleveland, 1963).Google Scholar
Paul Prucha, Francis “Doing Indian History,” in Smith, Jane F. and Kvasnicka, Robert M. (eds.), Indian-White Relations: A Persistent Paradox (Washington, D.C., 1976).Google Scholar
PurchasSamuel, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes: Containing a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others (20 vols., Glasgow, 1905–7), 19.Google Scholar
Richter, D. K. “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 40 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, Don “How Many Indians Were Killed? White Man versus Red Man: The Facts and the Legend,” The American West 10 (1973).Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall “Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History,” in Islands of History (Chicago, 1985).Google Scholar
Sapir, EdwardTime Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture (Ottawa, 1916)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheehan, Bernard W.Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973).Google Scholar
Silverberg, Robert S.Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (Greenwich, N.Y., 1968).Google Scholar
Sioui, GeorgesFor an Amerindian Autohistory: An Essay on the Foundations of a Social Ethic, trans. Fischman, Sheila (Montreal, 1992).Google Scholar
Slotkin, RichardRegeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973).Google Scholar
Spiller, Robert E.Thorp, Willard, Johnson, Thomas H., and Canby, Henry Seidel (eds.), Literary History of the United States (3 vols., New York, 1948), 1.Google Scholar
Taylor, Brook M.Promoters, Patrioss, and Partisans: Historiography in Nineteenth-Century English Canada (Toronto, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thwaites, Reuben G. (ed.), The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (73 vols., Cleveland, 1896–1901), 5.Google Scholar
Tooker, Elizabeth “The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League,” Ethnohistory 35 (1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trelease, A. W.Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960)Google Scholar
Trigger, B. G. “Ethnohistory and Archaeology,” Ontario Archaeology 30 (1978)Google Scholar
Trigger, Bruce G.The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal, 1976).Google Scholar
Trigger, Bruce “Alfred G. Bailey – Ethnohistorian,” Acadiensis 18(2) (1989).Google Scholar
Trigger, , “Archaeology and the Ethnographic Present,” Anthropologica 23 (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turner, , The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920, 1947), 1.Google Scholar
Vaughan, Alden and Richter, Daniel K., “Crossing the Cultural Divide: Indians and New Englanders, 1605–1763,” ,American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings 90 (1980).Google Scholar
Vaughan, Alden “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review 87 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaughan, AldenNew England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston, 1965; rev. ed. New York, 1979).Google Scholar
Washburn, Wilcomb E. “Anthropological Advocacy in the Hopi-Navajo Land Dispute,” American Anthropologist 91 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Washburn, Wilcomb E.Red Man’s Land/White Man’s Law (New York, 1971, and new edition, Norman, Okla., 1995).Google Scholar
White Rowlandson, MaryThe Soveraignty and Goodness of God … Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson … (Boston, 1682).Google Scholar
William De Forest, JohnHistory of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford, 1851; reprint ed. with introduction by Washburn, Wilcomb E., Hamden, Conn., 1964).Google Scholar
Winsor, JustinCartier to Frontenac (Boston, 1894).Google Scholar
Winsor, JustinChristopher Columbus and How He Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery (Boston, 1892).Google Scholar
Wolf, Eric R.Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×