Ethnohistory
Books:
Anderson, Gary. Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society
Press, 1986.
Biography portraying the Sioux leader as an accommodationist. The study examines how
Little Crow exploited kinship relations with mixed blood relatives and white trader inlaws. This system for personal success declined in the 1860s as white traders felt less
inclined to observe former kinship obligations.
Anderson, Karen. Chain Her By One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in SeventeenthCentury New France. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Discusses how Native American culture was disrupted by the arrival of Europeans,
particularly gender roles. Employing Foucault power theory Anderson demonstrates how
disease, war, famine and trade promoted the subjugation of women among the Huron and
Montaignais Indians.
Axtell, James. Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
A collection of essays exploring both European and Indian perspectives on the invasion
of North America. The text is concerned with the moral implications of early interactions
and concludes with a historiographical discussion of the debate with special emphasis on
the quincentenary of Columbus’ arrival.
_____, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Ten essays that employ a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to present both a
discussion and example of ethnohistory in Colonial America. Themes addressed include
methodology, image, kinship, language, and cultural adaptations. The text is divided into
four parts: first, an analysis of ethnohistory methods; second, European efforts to convert
the Indian; third, Indian impact on Europeans; and finally, a summation of mutual impact
and labels applied in the “American Encounter.”
_____. The Invasion Within: the Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985.
Examination of French and British efforts to civilize Native American populations that
emphasizes socio-cultural interaction and adaptation. Contrasts the successful adaptive
nature of French approach with English designs to “destroy the Indian.”
_____. Natives and Newcomers: the Cultural Origins of North America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
“The volume is anchored geographically—East of the Appalachian Mountains—an
chronologically—between Columbus’ voyage in 1492 and the conclusion of the
American Revolution in 1783. The fourteen essays.... contains elements of history,
anthropology, culture, and lively analysis of the porous nature of the barrier between
natives and newcomers.” James T. Carroll, The History Teacher, vol. 35:1 (Nov. 2001),
p. 108-9.
Basson, Lauren L. White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the
Boundaries of State and Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
“In White Enough to Be American? Lauren Basson crafts what she terms a “sociological
microanalysis of four political and legal cases” (25). Focusing on the subject of mixedrace indigenous individuals and populations in the United States, Canada, and Hawaii at
the turn of the twentieth century, Basson explores “how debates about indigenous people
of mixed descent and racially mixed territories redefined the boundaries of nation and
state” (12). Her specific field of analysis consists of four controversial cases that garnered
widespread attention between 1885 and 1905. Basson assesses the situations of mixedrace individuals: Jane Waldron, who fought a legal battle to receive an allotment in the
Sioux Nation of South Dakota; Louis Riel, a dual citizen of the United States and Canada
who championed Métis rights; Robert Wilcox, who struggled for Native Hawaiian home
rule; and Lucy Parsons, who protested the condition of workers in the anarchist
movement in Chicago. In reviewing these cases through court records, letters, speeches,
newspaper articles and editorials, and congressional debates, Basson finds that U.S.government and media figures rejected mixed-race people because of the challenge they
posed to the racial boundaries of the imagined U.S. nation-state.” – Tiya Miles,
Ethnohistory, Vol. 56, Iss. 1 (Winter 2009) p. 199-200.
Biolsi, Thomas and Larry J. Zimmerman, (eds). Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr.
and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997.
Collection of essays evaluating the changing and controversial relationship between
Indians and anthropologists since Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969).
Explores interpretations of Deloria’s message and application today. Concludes with a
new essay by Deloria.
Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest
Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 2002.
Examines the use of slaves and transmission of slavery practices among the Apaches,
Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards. Brooks demonstrates how the
institution served to enhance and redistribute wealth while fostering kinship relations
between otherwise hostile groups.
Calloway, Colin G. New Worlds For All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early
America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Examines the early interactions of Indians with English, French, and Dutch colonists.
Calloway demonstrates how Native American’s influenced mainstream Euro-American
culture.
_____, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Covers all North America from pre-history through the mid-18th century. Employs broad
archeological, historical, and ethnographic materials, including oral traditions.
Demonstrates secondary role of Europeans and infuses Native American communities
with dynamic attributes of innovation and adaptation, peace and conflict, accommodation
and resistance.
_____, Colin G. (ed). Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indians Views of How the West Was
Lost. Boston: Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Demonstrates Plains Indian distinctiveness as a product of innovation more than tradition.
Emphasis on how Plains Indians employed horses and firearms to revolutionize their
culture, and notes the opportunities and problems that accompanied these adaptations.
_____, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native
American Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Study of eight Indian communities during the Revolutionary War. Emphasizes Indian
agency in tracing their diplomacy, strategies, and conflicts.
Brave Bird, Mary. Lakota Woman. New York : Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
Autobiography tracing the anguished childhood of Mary Brave Bird, the 1973 stand off at
Wounded Knee, her marriage to AIM activist and medicine man Leonard Crow Dog,
cultural trends such as Indian macho-ism, and spiritual renewal movements.
Deloria, Ella Cara. Waterlily. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Ethnographic novel conveying the 19th century life and culture of a young Sioux girl.
Offers a female perspective as it conveys the daily experience, maturation, and ritual, of
young Waterlily.
Deloria, Vine, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan
Company, 1969.
Examines the relationship between Indians and the broader American public with special
emphasis on myths, perceptions, and the failure of the reservation system. Deloria gives
insight to the Indian experience and is sure to evoke laughter and/or anger as he calls
Indians to intellectually mobilize to resolve “the white problem.”
Dennis, Matthew. Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in
Seventeenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
“[T]ells the story of Iroquois, Dutch, and French interaction before 1666.... divided into
three parts, one each for the Iroquois, the Dutch, and the French. Dennis’s approach,
which he calls ‘Cubist history’ (p. 4), is first to explain the history of each group from its
own perspective and then to discuss the ways in which the Iroquois interacted initially
with the Dutch and then the French. By this method Dennis hopes to ‘elucidate the nature
and meaning of life’ (p. 2) among these three groups as well as describe the landscapes
they created fro themselves individually and collectively.” --J.A. Brandao, William and
Mary Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2 (Apr., 1994), p. 320.
Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity,
1745-1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Traces intertribal relations and religious revitalizations during the last half of the
eighteenth century. Dowd explores commonalities and pan-Indianism among the
Delawares, Shawnees, Cherokees, and Creeks.
Dowd, Gregory Evans. War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
“Shifting from councils at frontier outposts to deliberations at Whitehall, Dowd
elucidates the contradictions in British policy toward Indian sovereignty that helped
ignite the conflict... His explication of both sides' strategies and tactics in the ferocious
struggle is both sober and gripping. And, in perhaps his most original contribution, he
skillfully uses the perforce meager evidence to analyze the religious dimensions of the
Indians' resistance. A stylish writer with a talent for compression, Dowd engages and
advances while making the lines of those debates clear to the general reader. His book is
the best account of its subject.” –Benjamin Schwarz Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2004)
Edmonds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
“In the early 1800s, when control of the Old Northwest had not yet been assured to the
United States, the Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee
Prophet, led an intertribal movement culminating at the Battle of Tippecanoe and the
Battle of the Thames. Historians have portrayed Tecumseh, the war leader, as the key
figure in forging the intertribal confederacy. In this full-length biography of
Tenskwatawa, R. David Edmunds shows that, to the contrary, the Shawnee Prophet
initiated and for much of the period dominated the movement, providing a set of religious
beliefs and ceremonies that revived the tribes' fading power and cohesion.” –From the
Press
Foster, Morris. Being Comanche: a social history of a Native American community. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1991.
“Foster argues persuasively that the Comanche of Oklahoma have endured as a separate
cultural entity despite the destruction of their traditional way of life, their being
dispossessed, and their exposure to an ongoing federal assimilation program. The most
important ingredient of cultural cohesiveness has been the ability of the group and its
subdivisions to congregate in public gatherings, to set and govern its own standards of
acceptable behavior.” – James Riding In, The Journal of American History, vol. 79: 3
(Dec., 1992), 1192-1193.
Fowler, Loretta. Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre Culture and History, 17781984. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Among the first wave of works to reject the wholesale acculturation model, “Fowler
explores their differing, sometimes contested interpretations of common symbols,
seeking to understand how viable communities persist in the face of pressure to merge
with other Indians and to submerge within the dominant American pattern.” –Alice
Kehoe, American Anthropologists, Vol.91:1 (March, 1989), 205.
Frank, Andrew. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Study of relationships between Creek Indian women and “Indian countrymen “
(European men living among Indians) in the Southeast. Examines how these relationships
impacted residence, status, and identity, and how participants balanced demands from
two different cultural worlds.
Green, Michael. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
This case study on removal offers a Creek Nation tribal history from pre-history through
the mid-nineteenth century, and is organized by chronological themes of pre-European
contact ethnography, erosion of tribal autonomy, politicization of the tribal agency,
treaties with Europeans, and repeated removals.
Gutierrez, Ramon. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and
Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Controversially explores three eras in Pueblo culture, beginning with the autochthonous
Indians, the Spanish occupation, and the Mexican nation. All eras are bound together by
themes of power, sexuality, and nation building.
Hall, John W. Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009.
“Uncommon Defense shows that the conflict between Black Hawk and the United States
was also an ‘Indian war’ in which Menominees, Dakotas, Ho Chunks, and Potawatomis
sided with the Americans against the Sauks, and different tribes had their own agendas,
strategies, and experiences. A refreshing look at a story we thought we knew well.”—
Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College
Hudson, Charles M and Carmen Chaves Tesser. The Forgotten Centuries : Indians and
Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
Seventeen essays in four sections devoted to Spanish exploration, specific communities,
trans formation of indigenous societies, and the constitution of new societies from a
patchwork of predecessors. Though at times a bit disconnected, the text offers a broad
approach to cultural transmission and change.
Kehoe, Alice B. North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, 2nd Edition, Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1981.
Epic history of Native Americans from before the arrival of Europeans through the close
of the twentieth century. It is anthropological in scope and includes thorough
bibliographies and suggested readings lists.
Krech, Shepard, III, (ed). Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the
Game. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981.
A “critique by seven anthropologists of Martin’s The Keepers of the Game. Each accuses
Martin of naively borrowing concepts and interpretations from anthropology.... [It]
presents a new interpretation of the over-hunting of beavers in northern North America
by Indians who were involved in trade with Europeans. Martin argues that the cause was
not the introduction of the profit motive and superior technology, but rather a kind of
‘holy war’ conducted against apostatizing allies.” –Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Journal of
interdisciplinary History, 14:1 (Summer, 1983), 170.
Leow, Patty. Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal. Madison :
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2001.
A collection of twelve tribal histories that builds on Native sources—oral history, songs
and stories, recorded Indian comments and interviews, tribal newspapers, etc—and
prepared in conjunction with elders and tribal historians from each community.
Lightfoot, Kent G, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: the Legacy of Colonial Encounters on
the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
“Lightfoot exemplifies the historical approach in anthropology by critically synthesizing
documentary, oral, and archaeological data to examine late seventeenth and early
eighteenth Century encounters involving Spanish and Russian colonies and the native
peoples of coastal California.” Arthur A. Joyce, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial
History, vol. 6:2 (Fall, 2005).
Mancall, Peter C. and James Hart Merrell. American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from
European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850. New York: Routledge, 2000.
This collection of twenty-five previously published but classic articles discuss IndianEuropean interactions stressing a variety of issues including resistance, cultural exchange,
and wage labor.
Martin, Calvin. Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978.
“Carefully limiting his analysis to the Ojibwa, Cree, Montagnais-Naskapi and Micmac,
the author challenges the standard economic interpretation of the indians’ role in the fur
trade. He points out the fallacy of assigning them acquisitive western marketplace
values.” Laurence M. Hauptman, The Pacific Historical Review, 49:4 (Nov., 1980), 653.
Maybury-Lewis, David, Theodore Macdonald, and Biorn Maybury-Lewis. Manifest Destinies
and Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, David Rockefeller Center
for Latin American Studies, 2009.
“How was frontier expansion rationalized in the Americas during the late nineteenth
century? As new states fleshed out expanded national maps, how did they represent their
advances? Were there any distinct pan-American patterns? The renowned anthropologist
and human rights advocate David Maybury-Lewis saw the Latin American frontiers as
relatively unknown physical spaces as well as unexplored academic “territory.” He
invited eight specialists to explore public narratives of the expansion of Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, and the western regions of Canada and the United States during the late nineteenth
century, a time when those who then identified as “Americans” claimed territories in
which indigenous peoples, who were now seen as economic and political obstacles, lived.
The authors examine the narrative forms that stirred or rationalized expansion, and
emphasize their impact on the native residents.–From the Press.
Merrell, James. The Indians New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact
through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History
and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Uses archeology, anthropology, and folklore to trace the Carolina Piedmont tribe from
the sixteenth century until mid nineteenth century focusing on the Indians’ adaptations as
they interacted with disease, diplomats, missionaries, and traders.
Minor, Nancy McGown. The Light Gray People: An Ethno-History of the Lipan Apaches of
Texas and Northern Mexico. Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 2009.
“Although Lipan Apache culture was studied by one of the most eminent anthropologists
of the twentieth century, many important questions remain. What is the meaning of the
tribal name Lipan? Did Morris Opler's 1935 study of historical Lipan culture conform to
practices seen by eighteenth century Spaniards? Only four in situ observations of Lipan
Apache culture survive - observations made by a Spanish priest, a Spanish military
officer, a Swiss botanist and an Anglo captive. Each source reveals fascinating insights
into a hitherto unseen world of Lipan beliefs and practices. The sources reported, for
example, that the Lipans were able to predict both solar and lunar eclipses, a practice
which went far beyond the vision quest posited by Opler. The Light Gray People seeks to
complete a comparative analysis of traditional Lipan Apache culture, as seen through the
eyes of four eighteenth and nineteenth century observers and Morris Opler's theories.” –
From the Press
O'Brien, Jean. Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts,
1650-1790. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Examines the progressive dispossession of New England Indians and how they retained
identity despite territorial pressures and subsequent cultural adaptation. Rather than
disappear, Indians resisted European expansion and employed English cultural practices
and institutions to rebuild their own communities.
Preston, David L. The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the
Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783. University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
“The Texture of Contact is a landmark study of Iroquois and European communities and
coexistence in eastern North America before the American Revolution. David L. Preston
details the ways in which European and Iroquois settlers on the frontiers creatively
adapted to each other’s presence, weaving webs of mutually beneficial social, economic,
and religious relationships that sustained the peace for most of the eighteenth century…
One of the most comprehensive studies of eighteenth-century Iroquois history, The
Texture of Contact broadens our understanding of eastern North America’s frontiers and
the key role that the Iroquois played in shaping that world.” – From the Press
Ray, Arthur J. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role As Hunters, Trappers, and Middlemen in the
Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.
This text explores Canadian Indians’ place in the fur trade, emphasizing Indian strategies
and trade systems.
Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era
of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Examines Iroquois from pre-contact until about 1730, exploring gender, clan, and
community patterns of obligation to emphases creative adaptations in politics and
diplomacy that preserved cultural autonomy. Effectively demonstrates how historians
should use oral tradition.
Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark Among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1984.
Follows the expedition west while examining the tribes encountered by the captains. Not
a comprehensive history of the expedition, but rather a study of their interactions with
various tribes that features misunderstandings, mistakes, and subtle implications of each
tribe’s unique culture and geo-political situation.
Sahlins, Marshall. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, vol.1:
Historical Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
“The work embodies a synthesis of late-twentieth-century knowledge of Hawaii, with
new and compelling interpretations of Hawaiian archaeology, anthropology, and
history… The result is a classic study of the impact of the world system on one remote
upland segment of rural Hawaii between the 1770s and the 1880s.” – Caroline Ralston,
Ethnohistory, vol. 41:2 (Spring, 1994), 323.
Sahlins, Marshall. Island History. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Collection of theoretical essays that employ the islands of Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zeland
to facilitate a larger critique of “Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies
between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and
society.” --from the publisher
Silko, Leslie. Ceremony. New York, N.Y. : Penguin Books, 1977, 1986.
Fictional account of a Laguna Indian and the personal and social struggles he faces when
re turning home from World War II. Unable to find solace in the alcoholic retreat of his
piers, young Toyo accepts the guidance of a medicine man and turns to the land and
ancient rituals to find peace.
Wilkins, Teresa J. Patterns of Exchange: Navajo Weavers an Traders. Tulsa: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2008.
“The Navajo rugs and textiles people admire and buy today are the result of many
historical influences, particularly the interaction between Navajo weavers and the traders
who guided their production and controlled their sale. John Lorenzo Hubbell and other
late-nineteenth-century traders were convinced they knew which patterns and colors
would appeal to Anglo-American buyers, and so they heavily encouraged those designs.
In Patterns of Exchange, Teresa J. Wilkins traces how the relationships between
generations of Navajo weavers and traders affected Navajo weaving.” – From the Press
Wilkinson, Charles. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. New York : Norton,
2005.
Legal and political centered discussion of activism and sovereignty of Indian Nations
from the reservation period to present. “Wilkinson effectively demonstrates the rise of
modern Indian nations from the ashes of termination.... The establishment of the National
Congress of American Indians (NCAI), Menominee Restoration, and the Alaska Native
Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) all emerge as particularly important stories in the
movement toward tribal self-determination.” -- Doug Kiel, H-AmIndian review (August,
2006)
Yannakakis, Yanna. The Art od Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and
Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
“In The Art of Being In-between Yanna Yannakakis rethinks processes of cultural change
and indigenous resistance and accommodation to colonial rule through a focus on the
Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a rugged, mountainous, ethnically diverse, and overwhelmingly
indigenous region of colonial Mexico. Her rich social and cultural history tells the story
of the making of colonialism at the edge of empire through the eyes of native
intermediary figures: indigenous governors clothed in Spanish silks, priests’ assistants,
interpreters, economic middlemen, legal agents, landed nobility, and “Indian
conquistadors.” Through political negotiation, cultural brokerage, and the exercise of
violence, these fascinating intercultural figures redefined native leadership, sparked
indigenous rebellions, and helped forge an ambivalent political culture that distinguished
the hinterlands from the centers of Spanish empire.” –From the press
Ethnohistory
Articles:
Blackhawk, Ned. “The Displacement of Violence: Ute Diplomacy and the Making of New
Mexico’s Eighteenth-century Northern Borderlands,” Ethnohistory (2007), 37-70
Biolsi, Thomas. “The Birth of the Reservation: Making the Modern Individual Among the
Lakota,” American Ethnologist 22 (1995), 28-53
Clifford, James. “Identity at Mashpee,” Predicament of Culture (1988), 277-346
Hamalainen, Pekka. “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American
History 90 (2003), 833-862
Richter, Daniel K. “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly
(1983), 528-559
Updated by: Meaghan Heisinger (2011)
Originally Compiled and Annotated by: Matthew Garrett (2008)