Native American History - HIST 372 Resource Guide

Nicole Boswell, an Indian high-school student in White Earth, Minn., dreams of being a psychologist on her tribe's reservation. (AP Photo/Minnesota Public Radio, Dan Gunderson)
Winds of change are blowing through Indian Country, improving prospects for many of the nation's 4.4 million Native Americans. The number of tribes managing their own affairs has increased dramatically, and an urban Indian middle class is quietly taking root.

American Indians have the highest unemployment, poverty and disease rates of any ethnic group in the country. Yet Indian leaders say Americans are indifferent to their plight, as reflected in recent funding cuts for Indian programs.

Despite their great diversity, Native Americans share a fierce attachment to the land. But of the 1.9 billion acres that Native Americans roamed 500 years ago, only 46 million acres remain in Indian hands today.

Until quite recently, the concept of race has run through all histories of North American Indians. Invariably, scholars have portrayed Indians as inherently inferior to Europeans. This perceived inferiority is sometimes ascribed to divine predestination, sometimes to a lack of the capacity to learn the arts of civilization, sometimes to an inability to live in the presence of civilized Europeans.

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81) was a founding father of professional anthropology in the United States and his notebooks, letters and manuscripts provide a mine of information for the historian of the discipline.

1823–93, American historian, b. Boston. In 1846, Parkman started a journey along the Oregon Trail to improve his health and study the Native Americans. On his return to Boston he collapsed physically and moved to Brattleboro,

1861–1932, American historian, b. Portage, Wis. He taught at the Univ. of Wisconsin from 1885 to 1910 except for a year spent in graduate study at Johns Hopkins Univ. From 1910 to 1924 he taught at Harvard, and later he was research associate at the Henry E. Huntington Library.

Since the late 1500s, non-Indians have attempted to educate American Indians and to assimilate them into Euro-American society as an alternative to extermination. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, North American colonists largely were unsuccessful in these campaigns. The U.S. government's Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819 subsidized religious groups to provide Indian education. These efforts had limited impact. Although there were a few converts to Beginning in the nineteenth century, boarding schools played a fundamental role in the programs designed by the U.S. government to foster the assimilation of native peoples into the mainstream of American society. Reformers and politicians who favored the policy of reservation allotment also advanced the concept of placing Indian children in residential schools where they would speak English, learn a vocation, and practice farming.

European American educational models, policies, and institutions have been central to Indian-white relations, fundamentally altering the Native nations of North America. The federal government seized on education to civilize supposedly barbaric peoples, hoping to absorb them as productive, disciplined citizens, while at the same time eradicating indigenous practices and perspectives. Only during the latter third of the twentieth century did Native Americans begin to reclaim a measure of sovereignty.