Introduction

In this third edition of Native America, we hope to convey to you something of the history of America’s Indigenous peoples. As in the first two editions, we will not cover everything, and we will try to avoid what we consider the pitfalls of textbook writing: an effort to be encyclopedic to leave nothing out. We do not want our readers to feel as if they are awash in a sea of facts, disconnected from any coherent narrative. Too often, textbooks encourage students to view the past as a collection of names, dates, and places, never enabling them to realize that history—the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures—is so much more than that. History, the philosopher R. G. Collingwood aptly noted long ago, is “nothing capable of being memorized.”

We hope to provide students interested in the Native American past with an understanding of how the varied stories they will encounter in this text, and throughout their broader learning, fit into a larger whole. To that end, we will focus upon twelve Indigenous communities whose histories encapsulate what we see as the principal themes and developments in Native American history.

The Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley in today’s New Mexico and the Chumash peoples of coastal Southern California each confronted Spanish soldiers and Franciscan missionaries for the first time more than two centuries apart. Both rose up against a colonial system that brought devastation to their communities; both lived under successive Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes. The Pueblos received enormous attention from non‐Indians, some of whom sought to civilize and Christianize them, and others who indulged fantasies about the Pueblos’ way of living for a variety of purposes. Throughout, they quietly resisted those who intended to transform them. They never fought a war against the United States, for instance, nor did they ever sign a treaty. Yet the Pueblo communities stood firmly at the center of many of the most interesting discussions of American Indian policy. The Chumash, on the other hand, slipped into relative obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century, so much so that some Californians assumed they had become extinct, a product of epidemic and chronic diseases introduced by Europeans, the brutality of the mission system, and intermarriage with non‐Indians. Their “re‐emergence” in the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrates the resilience of Indigenous peoples and their ability to turn up in unexpected places, but also how a native community’s assertion of Indian identity can spark ugly and acrimonious debates in societies that claim to tolerate diversity.

The Powhatans of Virginia greeted the English colonists at Jamestown in 1607 after emerging as a regional power in the Chesapeake Bay over the course of the preceding decades. Many Americans know something of the mythical tale of Pocahontas and John Smith, but fewer understand the important role played by Indigenous peoples in the early history of this continent. By looking at the experience of the Powhatans—a collection of village communities unified under the leadership of a king named Wahunsonacock and his heirs—from their initial attempts to welcome the English and incorporate them as subject peoples, to their growing disillusionment with the colonists’ territorial aggressiveness, to the attacks they launched against the English in 1622 and 1644 and the wars that followed, and their subjugation and reduction to the status of tributary peoples, we gain insight into how Indians viewed those episodes that Europeans called “first contact,” “colonization,” and “conquest.”

The Powhatans survived the English onslaught, though at great cost. They faced additional struggles as Indigenous peoples living “behind the frontier” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: continuing assaults on their dwindling land base and way of life, as well as the efforts of white Virginians to classify them along with African slaves as peoples of color. In the first half of the twentieth century, they confronted a systematic and racist campaign to eradicate all traces of their existence from the state’s vital records. The Powhatans have consistently fought against those who attempted to erase them from history.

Indigenous peoples were not simply acted upon by their would‐be colonial overlords. Leaders like Uncas, for instance, of the Connecticut River Valley Mohegans, forged alliances with the newcomers and used the threat of English violence to extend power over neighboring Indigenous communities. Uncas provided the English with intelligence and allies, but at the same time worked to preserve enough strength to demonstrate to the English that they needed the Mohegans, who could pose a substantial threat to the colonists should they become disaffected. This approach worked for a time—Uncas played as large a role in shaping New England’s early history as did any of the region’s Puritan founding fathers—but the Mohegans soon enough found themselves surrounded by English settlements, their lands and their way of life under siege. In many ways they conformed to what colonists hoped they might become: they converted to Christianity, dressed like their neighbors, farmed their lands, and served as soldiers in times of war. They were consistent friends to the English. But they also preserved a distinct Indigenous identity in the midst of a white population that greatly outnumbered them. That is a noteworthy accomplishment, one that defies the long enduring image of the “Vanishing American.” Today the Mohegans live upon what remains of their ancestral landholdings. Thanks to their enormously profitable casino, they have reemerged as a significant cultural and economic power in eastern Connecticut.

The Senecas, the westernmost of the Five, and later Six, Nations of the Iroquois League, occupied a critical space in the European struggle for empire in North America, but they were never mere pawns in an outsiders’ game for control of the continent. Their actions, the meaning of which are debated intensely by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, were always directed toward the protection of Seneca interests and the interests of the broader Iroquois League. They confronted waves of epidemic disease and numerous invasions of their homeland by enemies both native and European. Still, they were a power with whom their rivals had to reckon. They suffered the dispersal of their population following the American Revolution. They faced the efforts of state and federal authorities to “remove” them to new homes in the west, to reeducate their children, and to deprive them of their lands. Yet they still reside on reservations that, if any number of people had their way, they would have left long ago. Owing to gaming and the retail sale of cigarettes and gasoline, as well as powerful assertions of their enduring sovereignty, the Senecas continue to inspire envy, admiration, and outrage among their neighbors in western New York.

The peoples who came to be known as the Caddos confronted three imperial powers: the Spanish, the French, and the United States. Their experience reveals the creativity with which native peoples adjusted to the new worlds wrought by the arrival of European colonists. They held these newcomers at bay, taking from them what they wanted but rejecting much else. Over time, however, they found themselves less able to resist the Europeans. No longer necessary as allies and trading partners, and with their lands coveted by growing numbers of settlers, the Caddos were driven out of their homes along the Texas–Louisiana border and relocated. The Caddos’ history of movement neither began nor ended with the Indian removals of the Jacksonian period. It was not until 1867 that the United States finally established a reservation for them. Even here, security proved elusive as they lost much of this land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Caddos ended up sharing their reservation with, among others, their Kiowa enemies, a people whose historic movements covered a vast expanse of the Great Plains. The Kiowas resisted fiercely the efforts of agents, missionaries, and soldiers to confine them to their reservation. The Kiowas’ experience allows us to analyze the devastating price Indigenous peoples paid for combating the United States, but also the integrity and determination of a community that struggled to preserve the core elements of its culture in the wake of military defeat. Like many Indigenous peoples, the Kiowas transformed their reservation from a prison into a homeland.

Not all of the Plains tribes resisted the United States militarily. The Crows, who live today on their reservation in eastern Montana, viewed their expansive and aggressive Lakota Sioux enemies as a more immediate threat than the United States, and they acted accordingly to secure an American alliance. Befriending the United States, however, provided the Crows with few benefits. Crow leaders helped their people make the difficult adjustment to reservation life, rallied opposition against the efforts of those who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hoped to break apart and appropriate their lands, and rejected the efforts of the United States to reshape their tribal government during the era of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s. Settlement on reservations could be a harrowing and demoralizing experience for Indigenous peoples, but the Crows’ experience shows how they survived, how they...