Fountain Steven M. - History of American Indians: Exploring Diverse Roots

History of

AMERICAN

INDIANS

Exploring Diverse Roots

Robert R. McCoy and Steven M. Fountain

Copyright 2017 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCoy, Robert R. (Robert Ross), 1962 author. | Fountain, Steven M., author.

Title: History of American Indians : exploring diverse roots / Robert R. McCoy and Steven M. Fountain.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016057556 | ISBN 9780313386824 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780313386831 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North AmericaHistory.

Classification: LCC E77 .M1147 2017 | DDC 970.004/97dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057556

ISBN: 9780313386824

EISBN: 9780313386831

21 20 19 18 171 2 3 4 5

This book is also available as an eBook.

Greenwood

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This book is printed on acid-free paper

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We have many people to thank for helping us to write this book. We have both been fortunate to live and teach in places where indigenous people continue to live, work, and go to school. The main campus of Washington State University sits on the homeland of the Palouse and Nez Perce peoples, and WSU Vancouver is located at the overlapping conjunction of Chinookan, Taidnapam, and Cowlitz homelands. In addition, the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area is home to one of the largest urban populations of Native Americans in the United States. We have both learned a great deal from the native people and communities who make their homes in the Pacific Northwest.

While there have been many people who have assisted us in the writing of this book, we would like to thank a few special friends and family who have made this work possible. Robs dear friend and mentor Clifford Trafzer taught him how to see the vibrant and distinct histories of native people that have often been hidden by the powerful narratives of the dominant culture. Steves interactions with Jack Forbes and David Weber continue to shape his thinking even though both men have walked on in recent years. Many others have contributed through brief conversations, shared knowledge, and ongoing scholarship. Friends and colleagues continue to help us both learn more through their scholarship and example. Barbara Aston, Katy Barber, Trevor Bond, Mary Collins, Steve Crum, Andy Fisher, Michael Holloman, Mike Iyall, Ron Pond, Sam Robinson, and Orlan Svingen are only a few of the people we want to acknowledge for their wisdom and tireless work on behalf of indigenous communities.

Thanks also go to Robs and Steves families who supported them throughout the process of writing the book. Robs children, Lilly and Liam, and Steves son, Huxley, have served as needed distractions and medicine. We have also enjoyed telling them the stories of the native people whose homeland we live in and have been honored to have our children welcomed to events and ceremonies they will remember all of their lives. Robs wife, Amy, and Steves wife, Kathi, have been constantly supportive, serving as both encouragement and copy editors. Without their help, we would not have been able to complete this work.

Robert R. McCoy and Steven M. Fountain

Writing a history of American Indians has been a daunting task. Perhaps a better title for the book would have been Histories of American Indians , since there are 562 federally recognized tribes and a large number of unrecognized tribal communities in the United States. Each of these communities has their own story and history that deserves to be told. While we could only touch on a few strands from this vast tapestry of history, we want to recognize the importance and worth of all these varied stories and the important part that they have played in the creation of our shared history here in the United States.

Yellow Wolf, a Nez Perce warrior and cousin of Chief Joseph, asserted in his collaboration with L.V. McWhorter:

This is all for me to tell of the war, and of our after hardships. The story will be for people who come after us. For them to see, to know what was done here. Reasons for the war, never told before. Nobody to help us tell our sidewhites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told. (McWhorter, 291)

Yellow Wolfs succinct appraisal of the burden of history that Native Americans carry is quite remarkable and is a blistering critique of how the dominant culture in the United States has crafted narratives about Indians. These narratives have been disseminated through varied medium, including art, film, historical monographs, photography, and scientific discourse. Many of these narratives continue to hold sway in the popular imagination of various groups within the United States. Some of the iconic representations generated by these discourses include the vanishing Indian, the Savage, the Spiritual Indian, or the Drunk Indian. Each of these narratives and many others have served the broader non-Indian culture to understand and justify the often complicated, violent, and coercive nature of the history of interactions with Native Americans in North America. In addition, most of these narratives use the arrival of Europeans as the starting point of history for Native Americans, disregarding millennia of tribal communities history in the Americas.

In History of American Indians we seek to disrupt these narratives and place Native Americans as the central actors in the history of North America. Using the most current research and scholarship, we emphasize the agency and adaptation of Native American communities and cultures while also recognizing the daunting challenges that they faced through their long history of interactions with outsiders in the Western Hemisphere. Those outsiders are also important to the histories here, as those relations have shaped much of Native American history. Over time, outsiders increasingly affected the framework of everyday life for most people.

As we crafted this narrative, we organized our writing around three themes. The first theme centers on the diversity of native communities and cultures. Too often Native Americans are lumped together as Indians, forcing the incredible diversity of their cultures into a single portrayal or understanding, based on the preferred image of Indians at any given moment. We have attempted to lead readers down a path that emphasizes the different ways that native communities lived, worked, practiced religion, and sought to deal with newcomers to their homelands.

Second, our narrative focuses on the dynamic adaptation and agency of American Indians throughout their interactions with Europeans and Americans in North America. Native people often faced difficult choices when confronted with these newcomers and their culture. Some communities resisted militarily, some converted to Catholicism or some form of Protestant Christianity, while others sought to distance themselves from these massive changes. Sometimes these choices were life and death decisions that ultimately could destroy their way of life and culture. Some of the circumstances that native people faced could not be controlled like the demographic decimation of disease or the environmental consequences of the introduction of new animal and plant species. In the end though, as all human beings do on this planet, native people made choices to protect their families, communities, and cultures.