|
|
|
Reviews
American Indians in U.S. History
|
By Roger L. Nichols
|
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2003. Photographs, maps, chapter bibliographies, index. 242 pages. $29.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.
|
Reviewed by Jeffrey Ostler
University of Oregon, Eugene
|
|
|
| In this volume, Roger Nichols, a prolific scholar in the field of North American Indian history, has provided an admirably concise overview of the experiences of Indian people in the United States. After an initial chapter in which Nichols surveys competing ideas about human origins in America and describes patterns of life in pre-Columbian North America, he offers a series of economical chapters covering material from 1500 to the present. Nichols explains in chapter 2 how tribes interpreted the initial phases of the European invasion, and in the next chapter, how they responded to the growing power of Europeans in the eighteenth century. Chapters 4 and 5 narrate the United States's dispossession and conquest of Indian people from the end of the Revolutionary War to the late nineteenth century. A transitional chapter takes up the theme of how tribes struggled to survive and adapt to reservation life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The last two chapters of the book focus on Indians' responses to a new set of conditions beginning with the Indian New Deal in the 1930s and continuing through World War II, termination, and the period of activism from the 1960s to the present. |
1
|
|
Several aspects of American Indians in U.S. History recommend the book as a useful introduction to the subject for general readers and students. Much of the book effectively draws on specialized scholarly studies to emphasize important themes that have emerged in the past two or three decades of writing about American Indians. As Nichols explains in the preface, scholars have rejected an earlier narrative that gave "Indians no role other than of victim" and have developed a story that is "far more complicated" (p. xii). Thus, while not overlooking themes of conquest and dispossession, the book gives considerable emphasis to the ways in which Indians adapted to new conditions in order to ensure their survival. Following up on the theme of survival, Nichols devotes significant space to the history of American Indians in the twentieth century. At one time a book like this might have ended with the supposed "close of the frontier" in the late 1800s, but Nichols fortunately avoids this error. Readers interested in an introduction to American Indian history in the twentieth century and some of the issues in Indian country today will find useful information in the last two chapters. |
2
|
|
Although many of the perspectives in American Indians in U.S. History reflect the best of recent specialized scholarship in the field, the book does put forward some questionable interpretations. Nichols often criticizes Indians who directly opposed U.S. expansion and at times writes in such a way as to indicate that he holds them responsible for the destruction that, in the final analysis, resulted from U.S. expansion. Nichols states, for example, that militant Indians who resisted the United States in the 1830s and 1840s "spread terror across several frontier regions" (p. 109). Elsewhere, in introducing readers to the Paiute prophet Wovoka, Nichols writes that "his visions led to the Ghost Dance movement that swept across the northern plains in 1889–90 and brought death and destruction to the Lakota Sioux in the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee" (p. 145). Statements like these are troubling, as they obscure the primacy of European American settlers and their government in creating the conditions that American Indians resisted and misleadingly imply that Indian people were responsible for the suffering that the United States and its citizens inflicted on them. |
3
|
|
Another problem is Nichols's discussion of human origins in the Americas in chapter 1. Taking advantage of the public's interest in the controversy over Kennewick Man, Nichols begins this chapter with the 1996 discovery of this skeleton on the Columbia River. Rather than neutrally summarizing the debate about Kennewick Man, however, Nichols states that the skeleton "had no physical features that might link him to the ancestors of modern American Indian groups. Rather, the skeleton showed similarities to modern-day Europeans or Pacific Islanders" (p. 3). In fact, however, Kennewick Man has provoked a fierce debate among scientists, with many scholars holding the view that, although the skeleton may not be linkable to modern tribes as such, Kennewick Man was almost certainly related to populations that eventually became what we now know as American Indian peoples and was very likely not of European ancestry. Before conferring legitimacy on interpretations that risk inflicting political damage on Indian people, one would hope that scholars would adopt a principle of caution, especially when the evidence is as uncertain as it is in this particular case. |
4
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|