Bruce E. Johansen – Encyclopedia of American Indian History

Автор: Bruce E. Johansen
Название книги: Encyclopedia of American Indian History
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Америки, Австралии, Океании
Страницы: 1516
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This new four-volume encyclopedia is the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource available on the history of Native Americans, providing a lively, authoritative survey ranging from human origins to present-day controversies.

• Approximately 450 entries within four separate volumes

• Approximately 110 contributors from among the foremost scholars in the fields, including Troy Johnson on self-determination movements, Richard King on sports mascots, and Jon Rehyner on recovery of Native languages

• Hundreds of images, including illustrations, photographs, and maps

• A series of helpful research tools rounding out the fourth volume, including an extensive chronology, topical bibliography, and a comprehensive index

A BOOK CAN BE A TIME MACHINE, opening a window
on the unquestioned judgments and assumptions
of authors in other times. Many of these have
been delivered with a sense of European-American
self-congratulation. Consider John D. Hicks, who, in
The Federal Union: A History of the United States to
1865 (1937) opens a 700-page tome with the words
“The civilization that grew up in the United
States . . .” implying that nothing worth the name
occurred before Columbus planted European seeds
here (Hicks, 1937, 1). Paragraph two begins: “America
before the time of Columbus had developed no
great civilizations of its own” (Hicks, 1937, 1). This
text states authoritatively that the Mayas, Aztecs,
and Incas could not match “the best that Europe had
to offer” (Hicks, 1937, 1), despite the fact that
accounts of the Cortez invasion expressed a sense of
awe at the Aztecs’ capital city Tenochtitlan when
they first saw it. In the same paragraph, Hicks develops
reasons why he believes that Europeans surpassed
America’s “primitive civilization”: “racial
traits may account in part for this failure, but the
importance of the environment cannot be overlooked”
(Hicks, 1937, 1).
No time and no people speak with a single
voice, however. So while Hicks’ assumptions of
racial superiority remind us of Richard Henry Pratt’s
advertising slogan for the boarding schools he built
(“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”) even Pratt’s and
Hicks’ time were informed by other voices that
asserted enduring value to Native American peoples
and cultures. While Pratt’s slogan is sometimes
interpreted as an endorsement of genocide in our
time, to him it was friendly advice to peoples whom
he assumed would die culturally as well as genetically
if they held fast to cultures that he considered
out of date in a modern world. Multicultural ideas
that inform public discourse (as well as census
reports) in our time had precedents in Pratt’s and
Hicks’ time. The majority society was just not listening.
Consider Walt Whitman, for example, during
1883, as Pratt was fashioning his campaign to save
Indians by killing their cultures:
As to our aboriginal or Indian population . . .
I know it seems to be agreed that they must
gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a
few generations more leave only a reminiscence,
a blank. But I am not at all clear about
that. As America . . . develops, adapts,
entwines, faithfully identifies its own—are we
to see it cheerfully accepting using all the
contributions of foreign lands from the whole
outside globe—and then rejecting the only ones
distinctly its own? (Moquin, 1973, 5–6).
One newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, sent a
native woman, Susette LaFlesche (an Omaha), to
describe the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre.
She was married to Thomas Tibbles. Together,
a decade earlier, they had roused their city of Omaha
in anger over the torturous treatment suffered by the
Ponca Standing Bear and his band. Exiled in Indian
Territory from their homeland along the Niobrara
River (in northernmost Nebraska), the Poncas had
escaped and walked home, stopping in the city, their
feet bleeding in the snow, so hungry that they had
chewed on their moccasins. General George Crook
volunteered to be the defendant in a legal case that
established the Poncas’ right to return home.
History is full of surprises. The same year that
Hicks’ book was published, Matthew W. Stirling,
chief and later director of the American Bureau of
Ethnology for thirty years (1928–1958), stated in
National Geographic that the Albany Plan of Union
(1754) was fundamentally shaped by the Iroquois
Confederacy through Benjamin Franklin (Stirling,
1937). Such an idea is hardly universally accepted,
even in our time. For one, Steven Pinker, in The Blank
Slate, asserted that the same idea was flimsy enough
to dismiss without explanation in two words: “1960s
granola” (Pinker, 2002, 298).
Historically, we stand with Whitman and Stirling.
The Encyclopedia of American Indian History
attempts to redress assumptions that any single culture
is superior to any other. American Indian voices
were available to historians in the 1930s; it was, after all, a time of major Native rights assertion under the
Indian Reorganization Act, but many non-Native
historians seemed not to be listening. The writings of
Dr. Charles A. Eastman (or, to use his Dakota name,
Ohiyesa) and Luther Standing Bear were widely
published, among many others. Major nineteenthcentury
feminists (Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Matilda Joslyn Gage, to name two) had acknowledged
their debt to Native matriarchal societies. Still,
one can hardly imagine Hicks having any use for an
encyclopedia entry titled “American Indian Contributions
to the World.”
We start with six essays, written by our coeditors
and members of our editorial board, which
focus on the themes that dominate particular eras in
American Indian history. So, for example, if a reader
wants to find out why the Trail of Tears migration
happened when it did, s/he would find that context
covered in the essay dealing with the period from
1800 to 1850. The late Vine Deloria, Jr. once advised
non-Indian scholars to study the history of topics of
contemporary importance to Native peoples, and a
section of the encyclopedia addresses those issues
that are prominent both in the history of Native peoples
and in Native societies today. These entries
range from archaeology and pre-contact Native history
to topics like gaming and water rights, which
are still so relevant. Subsequent sections deal with
the most important events of American Indian
history, aspects of Native cultures that have had
ramifications in history, Native interactions with
non-Indian governments, and the roles of both individuals
and groups in American Indian history. One
of the most important sections of the encyclopedia,
the histories of particular Native nations, is
absolutely vital to the stories we’re seeking to have
told and deserves to be highlighted. Also, primary
sources from throughout American Indian history
are presented so that readers can get a flavor of how
different people viewed these events as they happened.
The occupancy of most of North America by
Europeans on a sustained basis is less than 200 years
old—four consecutive human lives then, less than
three now. Thus, the importance of American Indian
history to the recent history of all peoples on this
continent is clear. The history is written in what we
call our homeland—many of our cities, half the constituent
states in the federal union that calls itself the
United States, bear names that have Native roots.
If there is one thing we’ve learned from trying
to organize and do justice to such a vast and important
subject, it is that there is no way to present this
material that is perfect for everyone. Different people
learn best in different ways. However, we’ve
endeavored to be as clear as possible, making the
large number of materials and resources as easy to
locate and use as possible. An encyclopedia is not a
cast-iron product, but a collection of many contributors’
work. In our case, this is a mixture of Native
and non-Native voices. Selection of subject matter is
subject to judgment, and interpretation, and will be
reviewed—something or someone is included,
someone or something else is ignored, or given short
shrift. We can say only that we have done our best.
Bruce E. Johansen and Barry M. Pritzker, Editors
Steven L. Danver, Project Editor