| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Indians in U.S. History. By Roger L. Nichols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. xxii + 242 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $29.95, cloth; $17.95 paper.)

In American Indians in U. S. History, the venerable historian Roger L. Nichols forges a broad synthesis of the Native American experience. This might seem a rather pedestrian academic endeavor. Nichols understood the enormity of the challenge, however, when he accepted a request from the University of Oklahoma Press to provide a comprehensive general interest book for The Civilization of the American Indian Series. He had perhaps six hundred Indian groups to reckon with, five hundred years to cover, and popular and media distortions to surmount. Moreover, scholars and amateurs have told Indian history as a story of bloody conflict with Europeans, dispossession of lands, and population and cultural decline. While permutations of this received narrative remained accurate at specific times and places, this generalized approach reduced Indians to passive victims of an expanding United States. The local realities were more complex and the relationships between Indians and non-Indians were reciprocal rather than one-sided. In recognition of these concerns, Nichols highlighted issues that emerged as sources of conflict between Natives and Europeans including, "social organization, family relations, language, food, clothing, housing, religion, education, and medicine ..."(p. xii).

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