Blazing New Trails or Burning Bridges: Native American History Comes of Age

R. DAVID EDMUNDS

R. David Edmunds Forty-sixth President of the Western History Association. Photo courtesy of James Adams.
AT THE 47TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE of the Western History Association, held at Oklahoma City in October 2007, twenty-seven of the fifty-nine formal sessions listed in the program were devoted entirely, or in part, to Native American history and culture. Indeed, papers focusing upon Native American history outnumbered any of the other popular topics (environmental history, the borderlands, religion, or gender) by a margin of over two to one. Obviously, this meeting was held in Oklahoma, whose license plates (even if they're not tribally issued) tout the state as "Native America," and the program committee was chaired by George Moses and Melissa Meyer, scholars who are, to say the least, receptive to Native American topics. But even after accounting for such a confluence of favorable factors, no other major historical association, with the exception of the American Society for Ethnohistory, has featured a program so devoted to Native American history.1	1
For those of us who have spent our careers, or more accurately our lives, promoting, conducting research, publishing, and teaching in this field, nothing could be more heartening. Since 1970, the growth of Native American history as an academic field and its inclusion within the broader spectrum of American history has been steady, and its influence, if not always pervasive, still has markedly altered and improved the manner in which American history has been presented in most college or university classrooms. There are numerous examples that might be cited, but perhaps the best is the expanded coverage of the pre-Columbian period by college textbooks during these years.	2
In 1967, Samuel Eliot Morison's The Oxford History of the American People, a volume of over 1100 pages and the textbook used in many freshmen American history surveys during this decade contained only a precursory chapter of fifteen pages on the pre-Columbian period, and includes the complaint that "when we try to tell the story of man in America..., the lack of data quickly brings us to a halt.... Thus, what we mean by the history of the American people is the history in America of immigrants from other continents."2 In 2007, as more modern survey texts, replete with special sections on Cahokia, the role of tribal people in the economic and political development of colonial America, Indian removal, and the defense of the western homelands illustrate, things have changed.3 Obviously, those of us who have championed this field would like to see more Native American history included within these texts, but we are encouraged by this increased coverage and look forward to its future growth and development.	. . .