Teaching & Learning Guide for: Aspects of Early Native American History Cluster
Authors: Mancall Peter C. 
Published: June 2007

Author’s Introduction

Few aspects of American history have gone through as rapid a transformation as Native American history during the past generation. In the not too distant past scholars, including many anthropologists, wrote accounts of particular Indian ‘tribes’. Many of these works, which were often quite sympathetic to their subject, concentrated on politics and wars. Beginning in the late 1960s, historians, anthropologists, and those calling themselves ‘ethnohistorians’ began to bring new perspectives to the subject. To date, many of the most important studies focus on the period before 1850. Taken together, these works testify to the fundamental importance of understanding the histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas.

In recent years, scholarship about Native Americans has boomed. The cluster of six articles here suggests the range of work being done in the field. Nicholas Rosenthal provides an overview of some of the major developments and Joshua Piker offers a penetrating view of the concept of race and how it has shaped our understanding of Native peoples in early America. Ruth Spack’s short essay on American Indian schooling reveals a shift in the history of education based on the incorporation of indigenous perspectives. Tyler Boulware investigates the notion of national identity and its application for Native peoples. Dixie Ray Haggard’s perceptive piece offers nothing less than a major revision of scholars’ understanding of the Yamasee War of the 1710s, an event that played a pivotal role in the southeast during the eighteenth century. Finally, Steven Hackel and Anne Reid reveal the benefits of electronic publication. Their essay on the Early California Population Project provides insight into a major database housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a project now available to scholars that will revolutionize our understanding the period from the 1760s to the mid‐nineteenth century.

The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

Nicholas Rosenthal, ‘Beyond the New Indian History: Recent Trends in the Historiography on the Native Peoples of North America’, History Compass, 4/5: 962–974, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00340.x.

Joshua Piker, ‘Indians and Race in Early America: A Review Essay’, History Compass, 3/1 (2005), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00129.x.

Ruth Spack, ‘American Indian Education’, History Compass, 4/3: 615–620, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00324.x.

Tyler Boulware, ‘Native Americans and National Identity in Early North America’, History Compass, 4/5: 927–932, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00351.x.

Dixie Ray Haggard, ‘The Native Spiritual Economy and the Yamasee War’, History Compass, 4/6: 1117‐1132, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00360.x.

Steven Hackel, Anne Reid, ‘Transforming an Eighteenth‐Century Archive into a Twenty‐First‐Century Database: The Early California Population Project’, History Compass, 5/3: 1013‐1025, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00429.x.

Further Reading

1. Cronon, William, Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1983).

The field of environmental history, which can trace its roots to the mid‐nineteenth century work of scholars such as George Perkins Marsh (whose Man and Nature appeared first in 1864) was beginning to come into its own when Cronon published Changes In The Land. The book centrally focused on what Cronon identified as two ecological ‘contradictions’: the impossibility of Native Americans and Europeans living together in the region because their ways of using resources could not coexist; and the ways that colonists’ use of the land undermined their own ability to sustain their kinds of extractive economies, such as the fur trade, that had provided short‐term economic success. For students of the Native American experience, Cronon’s work provides insights into the ways that indigenous peoples inhabited a particular place and had to adjust to the changes wrought by colonization.

2. Crosby, Alfred W., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

In 1972 Crosby published The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. In that work he demonstrated the effect that Old World infectious diseases, most notably smallpox, had on Native Americans who possessed no immunities to them (unlike Europeans, who had been exposed to these illnesses earlier in life and acquired the necessary protections they needed to survive later exposure). He also demonstrated how American foods, such as corn (maize), potatoes, and tomatoes, launched a revolution in European diets. In this elegant follow‐up, Crosby showed how the biological forces that had enabled Europeans to gain control over the Western Hemisphere also shaped the history of the entire globe. Though some scholars such as David S. Jones [in Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)] question elements of Crosby’s thesis, the core of his findings remains crucial. Historians have repeatedly demonstrated the elemental force of disease in the Americas; perhaps the most revealing study is Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2001), which traces the course of a single epidemic as it raced across North America during the era of the American Revolution.

3. Eliot, J. H., The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

Eliot’s brief book, which was reissued for the Columbian quincentennial of 1992, was among the earliest work that revealed that it is impossible to understand the European conquest and colonization of the Western Hemisphere without a deep understanding of the native peoples who lived there. The book concentrates on European interpretations of indigenous Americans and the evolving networks that created the Atlantic world in the early modern era. It remains perhaps the best introduction to the era, and can be supplemented by Anthony Grafton’s lavishly illustrated New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

4. Hackel, Steven W., Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian‐Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005).

Scholars of early Native American history have primarily concentrated their efforts on the eastern woodlands and, to a lesser extent, the Great Lakes region and Mississippi Valley. That is, they have mostly focused on areas colonized by the English, French, and Dutch. But Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere on the Pacific coast too, and Hackel’s extraordinary study of Spanish relations with the multiple indigenous peoples of California stands as a monument to what careful reconstruction of historical evidence can reveal. The work is particularly strong in Hackel’s analysis of missionary records, which he examines in depth to reconstruct the lives of individuals and families.

5. Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1975).

Before Jennings wrote this book many scholars accepted the idea, embedded in Puritan accounts of the colonial era, that the English colonization of New England was an essentially benign process marred by unfortunate wars. Jennings launched a full assault on this notion. He demonstrated that colonization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was as brutal as the later military conquest of indigenous peoples of the Plains by the United States. Some historians questioned Jennings’s way of making an argument, especially in his later works, which lack the subtlety of Invasion of America. But no serious scholar of the field can ignore this book, which revealed that the English engaged in a conquest of the Americas just as effective and destructive as the Spanish.

6. Mancall, Peter C., and Merrell, James H. (eds.), American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to European Removal, 2nd edn. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007).

This enormous collection of scholarly articles, which runs to 739 pages, covers aspects of the Native American experience ranging from early contact through the era of Removal. Unlike some anthologies, this volume reprints entire articles, including the notes. The new edition contains new articles on servitude and slavery, interpretations of the significance of Old World animals in the Western Hemisphere, and essays that stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The volume contains classic articles, such as James Axtell’s ‘The White Indians of Colonial America’, which first appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1975 and Natalie Zemon Davis’s 1994 essay ‘Iroquois Women, European Women’.

7. Martin, Calvin, Keepers of the Game: Indian‐Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978).

Scholars traditionally understood the fur trade as a basic economic transaction: Native peoples wanted European goods, so the argument went, and so they hunted fur‐bearing animals more intensively in order to pay colonial traders for them. Martin, by contrast, argued that such a view undervalued indigenous perspectives. Rather than using the economic logic of Europeans, Martin argued that the historic fur trade can be explained by indigenous peoples’ understanding of the deities that governed their world, particularly the so‐called ‘keepers’ of the game. The spread of Old World diseases seemed to these Natives a repudiation of their contract with these animal bosses, and so they turned against them in a holy war that, as it turned out, encouraged the fur trade. His views were not embraced by all; a group of historians and anthropologists offered a powerful critique of Martin’s thesis in Shepard Krech III (ed.), Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981). The thesis remains controversial, but Martin’s core insights continue to demand careful attention.

8. Merrell, James H., The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute for Early American History and Culture, 1989).

Ever since the age of Christopher Columbus, Europeans had called the Western Hemisphere a ‘new world’. Merrell’s crucial insight, which he developed in this path‐breaking study of the Catawbas who inhabited Carolina, was that the forces unleashed by Europeans made the Americas a new place for Indians too. It is impossible to underestimate the effect of this breakthrough on subsequent scholarship. Almost a decade after Merrell’s book appeared Colin G. Calloway, one of the most prolific scholars of the Native American experience, published New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Merrell followed his own study with a sobering book entitled Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). The larger scholarly community has embraced Merrell’s work; each of his books won the Bancroft Prize, awarded annually to the best book in American history.

9. Nabokov, Peter (ed.), Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian‐White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, rev. edn. (New York, NY: Penguin, 1999).

Nabokov, whose other work includes the excellent Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior (New York: Crowell, 1967; rpt. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982) and Native American Architecture (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), has gathered together selections from indigenous oral histories taken from nations across North America. The selections range from pre‐contact premonitions of impending change through the era of early contact, tensions created by trade and European missionary activities, and indigenous efforts to prevent further loss of their lands. The work is crucial for anyone teaching Native American history because it serves to remind students that Native Americans need to be understood not only as historic actors but also as peoples who continue to survive, a simple point lost on many students.

10. O’Connell, Barry (ed.), On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).

In 1829 William Apess published A Son of the Forest. It was the first published autobiography by any North American Indian. He followed that work with a series of other books that were both self‐reflective and deeply critical of the European‐Americans who had displaced Native Americans, including works of history and political commentary. One of his books, Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained (Boston, 1835), bore a frontispiece of a white man handing a bottle of rum to an Indian with the caption ‘Manner of Teaching the Indian’, a bitter commentary on the nature of relations that had driven Indians and colonists against each other over the preceding two centuries. Writing as a self‐declared Pequot, Apess also demonstrated that the so‐called Pequot War of 1637, which contained within it one of the most brutal massacres in the annals of Native American history, did not lead to the destruction of these southern New England peoples.

11. Richter, Daniel K., The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Price for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992).

No confederacy of indigenous North Americans in the colonial era attracted as much attention as the Iroquois, a group of five nations (a sixth joined in the early eighteenth century) that dominated the territory that comprises modern‐day New York. As the historian Anthony F. C. Wallace had demonstrated in his classic work, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, NY: Knopf, 1970), the Iroquois managed to play the Dutch, French, and English against each other in a system that gave to these Indians a great deal of independence. Richter followed Wallace’s study with this elegantly written work, which traces the history of the Iroquois throughout the entire colonial era. In his next major work, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Richter developed many of his insights and applied them to territory well beyond the historic Iroquoia.

12. White, Richard, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650–1815 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Many studies of relations between Native Americans and Europeans (and colonists) focus on conflict or cooperation between two distinct groups. White’s study provides a much more nuanced way of understanding the complexity of the encounters that took place in North America. He analyzed the interactions between the Algonquian peoples of the Great Lakes region and their relations with, in sequence, the French, the English, and then the ‘American’ residents of the United States. His work is a model in part because of his unwillingness to accept the inevitability of historic change. White instead recognized that a close focus on specific incidents revealed the ways that Natives retained agency and the nature of contingency. White’s subsequent work, including his massive ‘It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own’: A History of the American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) continues to demonstrate the explanatory power of his insights – including his ability to write an entire book about the trans‐Appalachian West without once using the word ‘frontier’.

Useful Links

1. American Indian Heritage Foundation

http://www.indians.org/

Founded in 1973, the American Indian Heritage Foundation aims, according to its Web site, ‘to provide relief services to Indian people nationwide and to build bridges of understanding and friendship between Indian and non‐Indian people’. The site features links to examinations of problems facing indigenous peoples in the modern world, many of them the legacy of the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere.

2. George Catlin Virtual Exhibit

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/catlin/highlights.html

George Catlin (1796–1872) believed that American Indians were going to disappear. In order to capture their history and culture before what he believed was their inevitable destruction, he traveled into the West and painted hundreds of portraits and group scenes. His ‘Indian Gallery’ became one of the landmark visual productions of nineteenth‐century America. This virtual exhibit is supported by the Smithsonian Institution and presents thirty‐four of his most important images.

3. Edward S. Curtis, ‘The North American Indian’[digital edition] at Northwestern University

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html

Edward Curtis was perhaps the most important photographer of Native Americans. This Web site, hosted by the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, is based on the digitization of Curtis’s materials held in the special collections of Northwestern University. The site features 2,228 images from Curtis’s The North American Indian.

4. Library of Congress: American Memory Project

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

In recent years the Library of Congress has loaded an extraordinary amount of its collection onto this Web site. It includes materials drawn from a number of large repositories, including the photographic collection of the Denver Public Library and a collection entitled American Notes: Travels in America, 1750–1920, which includes 253 narratives from visitors to America, many of them commenting directly on Native Americans.

5. National Museum of the American Indian

http://www.nmai.si.edu/

This is the Web site of one of the most provocative museums in the United States. Unlike traditional history or anthropology museums, the National Museum of the American Indian follows an internal scheme devised by indigenous curators. Located within easy walking distance of the United States Capitol, this new addition to Washington’s museums maintains a Web site that complements the physical galleries.

6. National Portrait Gallery: Native Americans

http://www.npg.si.edu/col/native/index.htm

The National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, contains superb paintings of selected Native Americans. Included in the collection are portraits of such luminaries as Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet.

Sample Syllabus

Introduction: Telling Native American Stories

Nabokov (ed.), Native American Testimony, 3–17.

The Encounter

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 3–24, 51–83.

Nabokov (ed.), Native American Testimony, 18–31.

Piker, ‘Indians and Race in Early America: A Review Essay’, History Compass 3 (2005).

Conquistadores and Americans

Stuart Schwartz (ed.), Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 1–28, 79–99, 182–243.

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 393–426, 510–532.

Jesuit Histories

Greer (ed.), The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth‐Century North America (Boston, MA: St. Martin’s/Bedford Books, 2000), 20–93.

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 84–148.

North American Narratives

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 25–48, 427–82.

Nabokov (ed.), Native American Testimony, 68–89.

Religion and Community

Greer (ed.), The Jesuit Relations, 136–85.

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 149–215.

Nabokov (ed.), Native American Testimony, 49–67.

Dixie Ray Haggard, ‘The Native Spiritual Economy and the Yamasee War’, History Compass 4 (2006).

Traders’ Tales

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 216–360.

Nabokov (ed.), Native American Testimony, 32–48.

Captivity Narratives and Travelers’
Accounts

Vaughan and Clark (eds.), Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 29–75, 159–226.

Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh T. Leffler (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 13–67, 172–246.

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 483–509.

Revolutionary Histories

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 561–84, 665–84.

Whose New
Nation?

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 585–608.

Nabokov, Native American Testimony, 90–184.

Removal

Heidler and Heidler, Indian Removal (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2006).

Into the
West

Mancall and Merrell (eds.), American Encounters, 361–32, 637–64, 685–704.

Hackel and Reid, ‘Transforming an Eighteenth‐Century Archive into a Twenty‐First‐Century Database: The Early California Population Project’, History Compass 5 (2007).

Talking Back to Conquerors: William Apess’s
America

O’Connell (ed.), On Our Own Ground, 1–97, 117–53.

Focus Questions

How does the history of indigenous peoples of North America differ from that of colonists? If, to use the concept advanced by James Merrell, the Indians also inhabited a new world, why did it prove so destructive to them?

What does an examination of the religious beliefs of Native Americans and Europeans reveal about the ways these peoples understood each other?

How did Natives deal with different groups of Europeans?

Why did relations between Anglo‐American colonists and Natives become so destructive?

What does Removal tell us about the long‐term history of indigenous peoples in territory within the modern United States?

How do indigenous interpretations of the period from 1492 to 1850 differ from European explanations?

Seminar/Project Idea

Students can use the primary source materials in the course – found in sources such as Nabokov’s American Indian Testimony, Lawson’s New Voyage to Carolina, and Apess’s writings – to construct their own interpretations of the myriad encounters between Native Americans and European colonizers. Further, they can use visual evidence, such as Curtis’s photographs and Catlin’s paintings, to provide additional materials for their analyses.