Thinking Like an Indian: Exploring American Indian Views of American History PDF

"Thinking like an Indian": Exploring American Indian Views of American History Author(s): Frederick E. Hoxie Source: Reviews in American History , Mar., 2001, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), pp. 1-14 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30031022 JS...

"Thinking like an Indian": Exploring American Indian Views of American History Author(s): Frederick E. Hoxie Source: Reviews in American History , Mar., 2001, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), pp. 1-14 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30031022 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Reviews in American History This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  "THINKING LIKE AN INDIAN": EXPLORING AMERICAN INDIAN VIEWS OF AMERICAN HISTORY Frederick E. Hoxie In a recent collection of essays by Native American academics, histor Donald Fixico declared that "obtaining a tribal viewpoint, a Native feel and the other side of history, and then thinking like an Indian and put yourself in that other position, is mandatory for teaching and writin balanced history of Indian-white relations."' No modern scholar would a with that statement. As Fixico himself acknowledged elsewhere in his essay the call for a "tribal viewpoint" has been a central concern of Ameri historians writing about Native Americans at least since Wilcomb Washburn 1957 call for a "moral history of Indian-white relations."2 Fixico would also find a sympathetic audience among historians wh work in other aspects of the national past. "Putting yourself in that ot position"-imagining the object of history as its subject-has preoccupi historians of immigrants, women, African-Americans, and working pe for at least as long as it has engaged the attention of American Indian scho But as a Native American scholar, Fixico states the case with special p gnancy. For him-and for many other historians from a variety of ethnic a racial backgrounds-the academic effort to re-cast American history from t perspective of marginalized actors has fallen short. Fixico's invitation to adopt a tribal perspective and "think like an Ind is not new-or unique-but its meaning is not self-evident. How exactl one to "think like an Indian?" Do Indians "think" about history in a uniform way? And if so, does that "thinking" determine a "tribal viewpoint?" Is the an "Indian" viewpoint regarding American history? If so, how do we identi it? Anthropologists and literary scholars have often argued that despite the diversity of native cultures in North America, the values on which those traditional lifeways have rested frequently overlap. That position is most persuasive for the precontact communities that flourished across the conti- nent prior to 1492.3 Moving into the era of European expansion and native resistance-centuries of disease, warfare, displacement, migration, and dra- matic cultural transformation-the argument for a single native viewpoint is more difficult to sustain. Here is where describing the process of "thinking Reviews in American History 29 (2001) 1-14 @ 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 2 REVIEWS IN. AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2001 like an Indian" becomes difficult. It woul "tribal perspective" on the complex events does Fixico's plea mean for those who attem they "think like an Indian" when writing h What follows here are some tentative answ to Fixico's call is difficult, but we occupy a means to "think like an Indian" is a cruc compelling and threatening. Compelling bec tal belief that the historical imagination ca peoples. Threatening because it exposes hi attack from all sides of the professional ba concerned about affirmative action in th what they perceive as self-serving "studi no "perspectives" in "real' history, just f "think" like everyone else. From anot nationalist scholarship who reject attempts point of view or who retreat to a separate Native American history (or Asian Ame histories) that is unique and therefore u national experience. They might argue th Thinking historically about "thinking l pathway through these difficult issues. At first glance, defining how Native A particularly American history, would appea American Indians have been systematical five centuries. Throughout this period na and rejected European culture. It would s Berger's fictional Cheyenne elder in Litt summarized his view of people from Eu novel's narrator. The old man shook his hea crazy." What more is there to say than tha Actually, a good deal more. Native peop had a variety of reactions to newcomers the history of their interactions with n American Indian views of American histo over time as initial understandings have native communities have altered their locat and created new traditions. As one be narratives of American history one is struc between those narratives and the authors' d the national culture. Native American views of the United States are related to American Indian peoples' definition of themselves as both members of This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  HOXIE / "Thinking Like an Indian" 3 indigenous cultures and as residents ( citizens) of the United States. People w to American culture tended to view A unpredictable; those who felt themsel marginals or as members of the larger major features of the Native American v illustrate this relationship between the identity and the structure of Native Am II The first extended indigenous historical narrative regarding the encounter between Euro-Americans and Native Americans emerged from the religious and political upheavals of the late eighteenth century when a series of visionary prophets mobilized their communities to resist Anglo-American expansion into the Ohio valley. Neolin, a Delaware teacher whose home lay in eastern Ohio not far from the frontier trading post of Pittsburgh, was the first of these prophets whose careers can be documented. Described in early accounts from the 1760s as a young man, Neolin based his preaching on a vision that had convinced him that Indian people should separate themselves from all trappings of European culture. As part of his ministry, Neolin distributed a pictographic chart to his followers that represented white people in the form of a black box that stood between earth-bound Indians and the heavenly realm above them. The box symbolized the white man's evil gifts: drink, avarice and over-hunting. According to Neolin whites were a disruptive and dangerous presence in an otherwise harmonious world.5 Neolin's chart made it clear that he and his followers believed white people and Indians represented separate orders of being. Searching for allies in the struggle to resist the English and the Americans and identify common ground among divided and competing groups o wares, Miamis, Iroquois, Ojibwes, Ottawas, Shawnees and others, called for Indian unity. He argued that despite tribal and linguistic ences, Native Americans had more in common with each other th could ever have with the alien and evil race that had come from east of the mountains. Neolin called on his followers to reject European technology and trade goods (especially alcohol) and to make that renunciation public by participating in a ceremony that involved taking a special emetic that caused participants to vomit up any white poisons that remained within them. A generation later, Tecumseh's brother, the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, carried Neolin's message and the call for pan-Indian resistance to a confed- eracy of tribes gathered in Indiana. Tenskwatawa shared Neolin's view that whites and Indians had been created separately. He told his followers that the This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2001 Master of Life had assured him during a not make. They are not my children but th grew from the scum of the great water wh And the froth was driven into the wood numerous, but I hate them." 6 His mess forging the anti-American alliance that f alongside the British in the War of 1812. (A was carried to the Creeks of Georgia and A in the Red Stick rebellion that took place s A third prophet of this era, the Seneca H dramatic vision in 1799; he preached his world until his death in 1815. While Handsome Lake did not advocate armed struggle against whites, his historical outlook resembled that of his two colleagues: Indian people are a separate order of being; they must return to their ancient virtues, reject alcohol, and avoid European technology. Hand- some Lake's teachings also contained a unique element, a preamble that placed his teachings in a complex historical narrative. Handsome Lake began his lesson by tracing the origins of the strife that had engulfed the Indians living on the frontiers of the new American nation. It began, "a long time ago and across the great salt sea... that stretches east." In this land of whit people, a young "preacher" discovered a castle of gold ruled by a lord who gave him "five gifts" and instructed him to send those gifts across the ocean to a "virtuous" and "honest" people who had no "unnatural habits." The lor promised the gifts would make the virtuous people "as white men are" and after they had been sent across the sea the young man would become "chief of all the great preachers." The young priest peeked at the five gifts and thought it a bit odd that they were a flask of rum, playing cards, a handful of coins, a violin and a decayed leg bone (representing the effects of syphilis), but he remembered his promise to the great lord, so he set off in search of someone to deliver the gifts across the sea. Eventually he found a man named Columbus to whom he entrusted the gifts. After Columbus's voyage, the five gifts were spread to the New World; misery followed. Only then was it clear that the gifts had come not from the creator but from the evil one. It had all been a trick and the eager young preacher had been a fool to believe the great lord. According to Handsome Lake, the creator finally took pity on the people of North America and so sent four messengers to bring him the vision that was the basis of the Seneca prophet's teaching. Based on the wisdom of th four messengers, Handsome Lake's lessons promised to deliver his fellow tribesmen from the evil inflicted by the five gifts. 7 The message of these three visionaries was clear: Indian people and white people shared no common history. European culture was the birthplace of sorcery and evil; those who preached the goodness of Christianity or Euro This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  HOXIE / "Thinking Like an Indian" 5 pean culture were, like the young prie victims of a devilish deception. Citizens defined as incomprehensible and evil; ther of the two races overlapped. Native Am rested on a set of common origins and a s which historian Gregory Evans Dowd h much of the prophetic teaching that emerg of the early nineteenth century. III In 1831, while Handsome Lake's teachings were finding receptive audiences among the Iroquois peoples of western New York and the Shawnee prophet (forced west by the Americans) was settling into a new home near modem Kansas City, another American Indian visionary told his life story and embarked on a similar campaign of teaching and conversion. William Apess's A Son of the Forest carried a stinging indictment of American avarice and deception, but its author viewed both himself and his white tormenters from a different perspective than the nativist prophets of the Ohio and Alabama frontiers. Apess grew up in a world where the borders between whites and Indians could not be drawn with clarity. His father was the son of a white man and an Indian woman, and his childhood was spent travelling between Indian and white settlements in southern New England. Unlike the nativist prophets, he declared that all people shared a common origin. For him, ancestry meant nothing. "I consider myself nothing more than a worm of the earth," he declared.8 But the Apess revealed in A Son of the Forest was no less a visionary than Neolin or Handsome Lake. Growing up as an indentured servant in white households, the young Pequot was curious about Christianity and increas- ingly preoccupied with his own shortcomings. He was drawn to what he referred to as the "noisy Methodists," both because of their emotional services--"people shouted for joy while sinners wept"-and because they were persecuted by his upper-class employers.9 The Methodists' democratic culture and lack of formal doctrine finally won him over. For a lonely, frightened child separated from his parents and their traditions, the promise of Christian redemption provided a way of ordering the world. "I felt convinced that Christ died for all mankind," Apess wrote, "that age, sect, color, country, or situation made no difference. I felt an assurance that I was included in the plan of redemption with all my brethren. No one can conceive with what joy I hailed this new doctrine."10 Echoing the antislavery voices of his day, Apess used what he took to be the central message of Christianity-"Christ died for all mankind"-to This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2001 establish a moral yardstick against which his fellow Americans. His conversion arm used to position himself as a Native Americ Cut off from his own tribal traditions and community, Apess shared many of the Shawnees. But he did not take the nat Tenskwatawa. Rather than dismiss whites as inscrutable devils, he con- demned them in their own tongue: They were sinners, people who did not live up to their ideals. "How much better it would be if the whites would act like civilized people," he declared.11 William Apess offered his most sustained commentary on American history in his "Eulogy on King Philip," a widely reprinted speech he delivered in Boston in 1836 at the height of the controversy surrounding the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. The "Eulogy" was a defense of the seventeenth-century Pokanoket/Wampanoag leader's patriotism and, by implication, an attack on the patriotic hero-Andrew Jackson-who now stood poised to dispossess thousands of southeastern Indians from their homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Apess mocked the president's self- serving proclamations. According to the Pequot preacher, Jackson was really saying to the Indians, "You must go, even if the lions devour you, for we promised the land you have to somebody else long ago.... and we did it without your consent, it is true. But this has been the way our fathers first brought us up."12 Apess's moralistic reading of history led him to an apocalyptic conclusion. The evil of racial hatred must be eradicated from the nation so that every- one-Indian and white-might be free. "We want trumpets that sound like thunder," Apess declared, calling people to "go to war with those corrupt and degrading principles that rob one of all rights merely because he is ignorant and of a little different color. Let us have principles that will give everyone his due; and then shall wars cease.... What do the Indians want?" he asked rhetorically, "you have only to look at the unjust laws made for them and say, 'they want what I want."''13 IV The nativist and moralist views of American history dominated Native American thinking and writing about the national past for a century after William Apess's speech. Community leaders like Tecumseh and Neolin who sought to forge multitribal alliances frequently resorted to the nativist view. They argued that Indians and whites had nothing in common and that American behavior could not be explained or altered. Sitting Bull represents the most dramatic example of a nineteenth-century intertribal leader who This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  HOXIE / "Thinking Like an Indian" 7 relied on nativist ideas to explain his pre Relying on visionary experiences that deliver them from the Americans' relen man rallied a collection of northern plai rhetorical and religious stance lay behin central role in his victories over American forces in the 1870s.14 Despite the continuing nativist tradition in American Indian life, few of the nativist leaders expressed themselves in print. Nativist interpretations of tribal experience and American history remained within Indian communities, communicated orally to enlist new followers and to extend the influence of visionary leaders. They entered the printed literature through the efforts of anthropologists. James Mooney sought out Wovoka only a few years after his initial vision and at a time when his followers were still active in Oklahoma and on the Plains. His record of the Paiute prophet's vision was the first such account to be published. Handsome Lake's teachings, while actively studied and celebrated among Iroquois people, were compiled and published in 1913 through the efforts of the Seneca anthropologist Arthur C. Parker. These texts were gradually joined over the next several decades by scholarly studies of other visionary leaders. Until well into the twentieth century, Native American accounts of Ameri- can history that found their way into print generally followed the moralistic model established by William Apess. These included the widely reprinted speeches of and statements of Black Hawk, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sarah Winnemucca, and Chief Joseph. Speaking generally in the wake of a military defeat, these leaders called on white Americans to view their history in moral rather than racial terms and to see American Indians as fellow human beings rather than as barriers to civilization.15 The writer who developed this moralistic view of American history most fully in the century after Apess was Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux physician who became a popular author and lecturer in the decades sur- rounding World War I. Eastman published ten books of stories and autobio- graphical sketches between 1902 and 1920 while operating a popular summer camp and travelling widely on behalf of the YMCA and the Society of American Indians. The product of mission schools, Eastman shared Apess's view that Indians and whites shared a common humanity. Far less doctrinaire than the Pequot preacher, however, Eastman referred to the Creator in general terms and he avoided linking his message to the cause of Christian mission- aries. Eastman's reading of American history is most clearly evident in From the Deep Woods to Civilization, an autobiography published in 1916. The book purported to describe a young man's "rise" from a boyhood in the wilderness to the author's prosperous adulthood as a member of civilized society. On the This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2001 surface this is the case: A young boy is call who have converted to Christianity. He student, a physician, an important publi voice makes clear that his journey marked sionment. Civilization, he discovered, had Eastman treated survivors of the massacre as a lobbyist for his tribe he witnessed c civil servant he experienced the cruelty of as an educated Native American, he felt the displayed towards nonwhite people. The Indian culture was more virtuous than ci and spirituality are found to thrive better in a highly organized society." Consequen nity life" of American Indians was traditio ours to-day.... Behind the material civilization," Eastman argued, "primitive sway." 16 Eastman's moralistic perspective reflected the progressive political activ- ism of his day. His critical but ultimately reformist view-that Indian values could inspire humanistic reforms of industrial American society-was picked up by other writers of his generation. Arthur Parker, Francis La Flesche, and Carlos Montezuma differed with Eastman on various policy issues, but they shared his belief that Native Americans had something to teach the American majority. Perhaps most outspoken was Zitkala a Yankton Sioux writer who published short stories in Atlantic Monthly and other popular magazines and criticized missionaries and school masters for their failure to recognize Indian traditions. V A final view of American history emerged in aftermath of World War I when two broad historical processes crossed paths. First, social theorists-anthro- pologists, sociologists, educators and legal scholars-began to dismantle the progressive ideology that had dominated thinking about American national- ism since the first days of the republic. Rather than envisioning society as a homogeneous collection of individuals, each one protected by a set of legally protected rights, these new "social scientists" began to describe society as a collection of communities shaped by tradition, economic structure, ethnicity, or social institutions. At the same time, the first generation of American Indians began to emerge from American colleges and universities. While often products of a missionary education, these people looked beyond a religious or moralistic explanation for American history. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms HOXIE / "Thinking Like an Indian" 9 Most prominent among the Indian intell D'Arcy McNickle. McNickle's grandpar south to the Flathead reservation in Monta rebellion. Raised on the Flathead, McN Montana before leaving in 1925 to stud fortune as a freelance writer and novelist published his autobiographical novel, Th of Indian Affairs, working as a liaison of New Deal reformers in Washington, D.C tions. He continued to write as his work carried him across the United States and demonstrated for him how poorly Indians and whites understood each other's cultures. The experience convinced him that the barriers between Indians and whites were not racial or moral, but cultural. After World War II McNickle witnessed the onset of decolonization and began to understand the experiences of Native Americans in global terms. "Indians saw their history extending beyond tribal limits," he wrote, "sharing the world experience of other native peoples subjected to colonial domination." The solution to this situation, the way to narrow the gap between Indians and whites, was to extend the process of decolonization to the United States: to give Native American communities the right to function as independent entities. McNickle put it this way: "Return the right of decision to the tribes-restore their power to hold the dominant society at arm's length, and to bargain again in peace and friendship. Only by possessing such power can the tribes make useful choices within the social environment encompassing them." 17 In 1949 McNickle published a history of American Indians in the United States, the first comprehensive history written by a Native American. They Came Here First contained descriptions of the diverse and ingenious peoples who had lived in the Americas before 1492. He described native legal systems and religious beliefs and reviewed the history of contact and European expansion. "What the Europeans could not appreciate," he noted, "was that they had come face to face with customs, beliefs, habits-cultures-which had been some thousands of years in the forming. Whether these were inferior or superior was inconsequential; they had grown out of an antiquity of their own."18 This ignorance produced what he called, "The Indian War That Never Ends." D'Arcy McNickle represents an anti-colonial approach to American his tory. Writing from a secular perspective rather than a religious or moralisti one, McNickle and those who followed his lead, identified a number of American characteristics that defined the national experience: cultural chau- vinism, environmental exploitation, and bureaucratic inertia. Rooted in cul- tural misunderstanding and political ambition, American behavior must be altered, McNickle argued, so that native people might govern themselves like This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 10 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2001 other citizens. In a manifesto drafted for a nat McNickle brought this point home by connecti to the concerns of the then-emerging Third W What we ask is not charity, not paternalism, even that the nature of our situation be recognized an action.... the Indians ask for assistance, technica the America of the space age some measure of the original possessors of their native land.19 Like Apess and Eastman, McNickle saw a future the United States, but that future would requi native morality by Christian whites. It wo American democracy. V By the 1970s, when Indian activists protesting federal inaction began com- mandeering television screens while small armies of white and Native American lawyers launched assaults on the nation's antiquated policy appa- ratus, there were three distinctive strains of historical writing from which Indian analysts could draw as they sought to make sense of the national past. There has been such an explosion of creative scholarship in the past genera- tion that it would be foolish to claim that all of it follows neatly the patterns established over the previous two centuries. Nevertheless, if one focuses on the writing of Native Americans alone, there is an interesting congruence between these three inherited perspectives-nativist, moralist, and anti- colonial-and a great deal of contemporary writing. Three examples will have to make this case. Ward Churchill, who describes himself as a member of the American Indian Movement and a member of the Keetowah Band of the Cherokee Tribe, is both a political activist and an academic historian (he is a profess the University of Colorado). While ranging over many topics, from envir mental destruction to the antiradical programs of the FBI, he has bee insistent advocate of labeling American Indian history as the story holocaust. "From most of the history of what has happened," he writes, " perpetrators, from aristocrats like Jeffrey Amherst to the lowliest priva his army, from the highest elected officials to the humblest of farmers, op described America's indigenous peoples as vermin, launched literally h dreds of campaigns to effect their extermination, and then reveled in carnage which resulted." As a consequence of this sustained effort, concludes, "The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled."20 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms HOXIE / "Thinking Like an Indian" 11 Like the nativist leaders of the nineteen historical conclusions support his political c can Indians, demonstrably one of the most humanity, are entitled to every ounce of addition, Churchill charges that American l holocaust and deniers of its reality. Off manipulated government agencies to shield crimes. Americans, he asserts, have created a "New World Order" that "promises to institutionalize genocide as an instrument of state power." Using heavily footnoted texts rather than visionary journeys, Churchill offers a relentless indictment of American action that one can nevertheless imagine as a black image on Neolin's drawing of the road to heaven. The enemies of indigenous people share nothing with native communities; loyal Indians should join with each other under a single leadership, rejecting compromise with white leaders or involvement with American institutions. The most dominant Native American intellectual of the past generation has been Vine Deloria, Jr., author of the best-selling Custer Died For Your Sins, first published in 1969, and more than a dozen other works of history and commentary. Deloria's attention has shifted successively from white miscon- ceptions and stereotypes to radical activism to moral philosophy to the value of traditional native epistemology; it is therefore quite difficult (and probably unwise) to characterize neatly his complex point of view. Yet when one isolates his historical writing, his anti-colonial approach comes sharply into view. From the outset of his career as a public figure, Deloria insisted that non- Indians understand that Native Americans were not interested in "civil rights." Instead, he argued, "The modern Indian movement for n recognition has its roots in the tireless resistance of generations of un Indians who have refused to melt into the homogeneity of American l accept American citizenship." The goal of this movement was no acceptance from the white majority, but to restore treaties as the relations between tribes and the government. Such a restoration involve recognizing American Indian communities as independent, sovereigns. In Deloria's view, the revival of political activism tha witnessed and participated in during the 1960s and 1970s was an A version of the anti-colonial struggle that swept the globe in the ge after World War II: "The Third World ideology which proved so u Europeans in interpreting the events of the world... seemed to be fulf itself in North America as well as in Africa and Asia."21 While not among the Indian radicals who occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in 1972 or took over the crossroads settlement of Wounded This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2001 Knee in 1973, Deloria defended those actions be Native Americans sought more than "fairnes pressing need today," Deloria wrote in 1974, only recognize the international status of the I authorize the creation of a special court to sett passions cooled in the 1980s and 1990s, Delo sovereignty, not civil rights, should be the change in perception by both Indians and feder with Indians is imperative if any substantial pr future.... It is probably too late," Deloria conclu back into the bottle."22 From Deloria's perspective, the history of the United States resembled the history of any other imperial power. Gradually expanding its power over native communities, the federal government had implemented a series of authoritarian policies designed to justify and defend its seizure of Indian land and resources. American officials were not particularly immoral or especially unusual. "Exploration and settlement required a good deal of intellectual effort," Deloria wrote with his tongue fixed firmly in his cheek. "The Europeans were equal to the occasion" and they developed an approach "which, naturally, gave them all the advantages." American expansion, then, was carried out for selfish reasons and the treaties tribes signed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are an artifact of that process. But despite their colonial heritage, these treaties to Deloria are an important badge of Indian sovereignty, for they carry with them a recognition of the Indians' "residual right of political existence." It is this link between American history and contemporary treaty rights that defines Deloria's anti-colonial stance. 23 Finally, during the course of the past twenty-five years a courageous community of Native American scholars has entered the American academy; many of them are historians. Within the group are specialists in women's history, colonial America, federal Indian policy, Indian law, and western history. Like William Apess and Charles Eastman, these authors speak from within American society. Teaching and writing for non-Indians as well as Native Americans, these scholars do not draw the dividing lines so evident in the work of more radical figures. They are also reluctant to embrace the larger theoretical framework of colonialism (and its modern incarnation, subaltern studies). Their work falls into the moralistic/progressive vein. Anti-Indian actions are the result of avaricious land grabbers, legal schemers, misguided policymakers, and moralizing charlatans. Donald Fixico, for example, quoted at the outset of this essay, has written an account of the exploitation of tribal natural resources in the twentieth century. In his view, the story of the fate of Native American resources is part of the story of American greed. "Greed has become the driving force in This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms HOXIE / "Thinking Like an Indian" 13 seizing land and using its natural resou quences," he writes. "The tragic outcome o exploitation that Indians have experien unlike that of Apess and Eastman. America of fairness. In this sense, Fixico's monogra agenda of Winnemucca, Eastman, and A VI How has this review helped us to understand what it has meant to "think like an Indian" about American history? First, it seems clear that Native American historical perspectives vary over time and space. Influenced by political motivation, individual life experience, and historical context, these perspec- tives suggest that "thinking like an Indian" requires more than projecting oneself back into the precontact tribal world. Second, and perhaps more interesting, is the fact that none of these major interpretive approaches can trace itself to precontact Native American culture. Pointing out their postcontact origins does not, of course, lessen their claim to authority as "Indian" perspectives, but it does suggest that Native American perspectives on the past are products of history as well as of cultural inheritance. There is no essential "Indian" quality that functions across real time and circumstances. It would be tempting to end this essay on that anti-essentialist note. But there is another way to view this diverse community of historians. While shifting widely in their cultural outlooks, attitudes, and assessments of American culture, each of these historians speaks as an American Indian, a historical person struggling to understand his or her surroundings. The variety within the group reveals not the transparency of Native American culture but its complexity. "Thinking like an Indian" proved not to be as singular as Donald Fixico implied it would be. "Thinking like an Indian" turned out not to be something static, but something plural, changing, and unpredictable. Striving to uncover how and what Native Americans were thinking is futile only if one sets out expecting to find the same outlook at the end of each search. If we accept the diversity of Native American historical outlooks, asserting one's "Indianness" as an historian need not mean asserting a single point of view. Historian Richard White has observed that "there have been few peoples as culturally, politically, and socially complicated as Indians."25 If is true, as this essay has tried to make clear, focusing seriously on experience of Native Americans cannot be a simple or predictable t Understanding the complexity of native life, we cannot know in ad what "Indianness" will be. Nor can we predict what an Indian will th This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 14 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2001 Frederick E. Hoxie, Swanlund Professor of Hi Urbana/Champaign, is the author of Talking Bac From the Progressive Era (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1. Fixico, "Ethics and Responsibilities in Writing Ameri Academics: Researching and Writing About Native America am grateful to Colin Calloway, Betty Bell, and Brenda F on an earlier draft of this essay. 2. See Ibid., 95. Washburn himself was echoing Franz required scholars to reconstruct the history of cultural tr must necessarily be historical material, historical in the w Aims of Anthropological Research," Science 76(1932): 60 and Culture (1940), 244. 3. See, for example, Alvin Josephy ed., American in 149 4. A more scholarly version of Berger's viewpoint i attitudes towards American history. See Roy Rosenzweig the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (199 attitudes towards American history, the authors foun history was "the opposite" of American history. 5. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North A 1745-1815 (1992), 33. 6. R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (1983), 38. 7. Arthur C. Parker, "The Code of Handsome Lake," in Pa For the discussion of the meaning of the leg bone in the Great Law of the Longhouse (1998), 113. 8. William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Wr ed. Barry O'Connell (1992), 4. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Ibid., 307. 13. Ibid., 307, 310. 14. See Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (1993), Chapter 11, esp. 138. 15. See Donald Jackson, ed., Black Hawk: An Autobiography (1833; 1955); S.M. Barrett, ed., Geronimo: His Own Story (1906; 1970). For Red Cloud and Chief Joseph as public speakers, see F. P. Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis (1976), 126, 196. 16. Eastman, From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 188,194. 17. McNickle, They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian (1949; 1975), 285. 18. Ibid., 93. 19. Quoted in Francis P. Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 2nd ed. (1990), 246. 20. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), 2, 4. 21. Deloria, Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974), 20, 82. For biographical background, see Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995), 30-41. 22. Deloria, Behind the Trail, 228; Deloria and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (1984), 264. 23. Deloria, Behind the Trail, 85, 115. 24. Fixico, The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century (1998), xix. 25. White, "Using the Past: History and Native American Studies," in Studying Native America, ed. Russell Thornton, 237. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:54:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms