Historians disagree
Historians Disagree: Indigenous History and the Early Republic
What approaches do historians take to writing the histories of Indigenous people in North America from 1790-1850?
by Lori J. Daggar, Ursinus College
How should we think about Indigenous histories in North America from 1790 to 1850? Should our narratives highlight Indigenous experiences yet move according to the familiar beats of the era—the aftermath of the American Revolution; the War of 1812; revolutions in market exchange and transportation; Native removal; the coming of the U.S. Civil War? Or should we completely reorient our histories, focusing less on the United States during this period and more on North America and its peoples as a whole? Should we privilege the available written, archival documentation or should we consult Indigenous oral traditions, material items such as wampum belts and pipes, and living Native elders and leaders when trying to reconstruct the era?
These are but some of the methodological questions that animate Indigenous and U.S. histories from 1790 to 1850, and historians do not agree on their answers: some argue that we must center Indigenous histories and experiences throughout North America and understand that the United States is but a small piece of North America’s story; others argue that we can understand U.S. history better if we center Indigenous peoples and their experiences when reexamining more familiar episodes in U.S. history, such as the War of 1812; still others argue that the drama of U.S. history should include Native histories but otherwise chart developments of American society and democracy as a whole. And, of course, some argue for a blend of multiple approaches.
These debates are relatively new. University-trained historians increasingly turned their attention to Native American history beginning in the 1950s and ’60s. By the 1990s, scholars published a wave of influential scholarship that came to be known as the “New Indian History.” These latter histories centered Native peoples as actors, and they argued that no history of North America could be complete without considering Indigenous perspectives and pasts. Rather than merely include Native peoples in their histories—a method dubbed the “cameo theory of history” by Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr.—New Indian History scholars worked to center Native people in their books and essays and show how Indigenous peoples made and altered the trajectory of North America. These works were foundational both in terms of content and for the methodological debates that followed.
Since the heyday of the New Indian History, a new generation of scholars have argued that, despite the strides made by this scholarship, Indigenous histories remained (and remain) too detached from the worlds of Native peoples themselves. By the first decade of the 2000s, the birth of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and, with it, the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), ushered in a critique both of the history discipline as a whole and of Native American history as practiced. These scholars, many of whom identified as Native themselves, argued that Indigenous methodologies, questions, and knowledge needed to be at the center of any discussion of Native pasts. Their critique led to increased debate over methodology and, with it, related questions of periodization and perspective that have shaped scholars’ approaches to Native peoples and the United States in its early years.
These NAIS practitioners encourage scholars to rethink their periodization and narratives of North American history. For the period of 1790–1850, NAIS scholars argue that highlighting familiar events such as the Louisiana Purchase, transportation revolution, and Manifest Destiny ensures that the overarching narrative of U.S. and North American history remains U.S.-centric: Native peoples are forced to fit within the confines of a story that unfolds according to U.S. historical markers of import. What is more, even when historians of the early United States do discuss Indigenous histories, NAIS scholars often point to their tendency to focus on the eastern portion of North America and individuals such as U.S. Native agents and relatively elite Native individuals who engaged U.S. politics and institutions. The histories of everyday Native people who populated locales as far-flung as Haudenosaunee Country in what is now New York State and Makah Country in the Pacific Northwest, they argue, are lost to the overwhelming desire to focus on the emergence of the United States. An Indigenous-centered narrative, using NAIS sources such as oral histories and material culture, and engaging with present-day Native people and knowledge-keepers, they argue, would encourage scholars of the early United States to reorient their story against a continent-wide backdrop, and would lead to the adoption of alternative chronologies that unfold according to events that matter most from Indigenous perspectives. With this NAIS approach, new narratives could then shift how scholars conceive of both history and the United States altogether.
Rather than adopt NAIS methods and sources wholesale, however, some historians of the early United States (who nonetheless underscore that Native people play a vital role on the continent), have argued that there is much to be learned by viewing major developments in U.S. history using written archival sources foremost. Such scholars seek to understand the market revolution, for example, in new ways by looking at the Shawnees and their market practices. They also consider the extent to which the American Revolution appears different when considering the ways Muscogees (Creeks) engaged in diplomacy with Americans, Spaniards, and Britons during the conflict. Policy documents, recorded speeches, account books, and treaties remain at the heart of these historians’ source base. Some, though not all, such historians proceed more cautiously in engaging modern-day Indigenous descendants and storytellers.
Of course, there are still other historians and writers who follow neither of these approaches. These authors may decenter Indigenous histories in favor of a more sweeping narrative of U.S. political and economic power, democracy, and society. Such histories often point to the excesses and tragedy of Cherokee removal, yet then proceed to move the narrative away from Indian Country, overlooking other complex and diverse histories. Sometimes, this happens because a book quite literally cannot discuss everything or because a work’s themes may not lend themselves to a sustained exploration of Native history. Even this textbook, for example, cannot cover everything! Other times, writers simply do not deem Indigenous histories to be as important as a narrative of U.S. democracy and progress. Regardless of the reason, a decentering of Native histories holds great power. Historians’ writing and debates affect school curriculums and public knowledge, and this is one reason why NAIS scholars have made such a sustained and powerful push for a methodological overhaul: historians’ disagreements—regarding what themes to emphasize, whose stories to tell, which sources to use—ultimately impact the histories we share and remember.
Additional Reading
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S.History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023).
Brian Delay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexico War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (NewYork: Random House, 2015).
Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” Early American Literature 53, no. 2 (2018): 407–44.
Julie Reed, Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare, 1800–1907 (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).
Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American
Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).