Manifest Destiny versus Super-Agency

Hämäläinen has made a significant contribution, over the past twenty years, to the rise of “continental history.” This current, which stems from the New Indian History of the 1970s and its focus on the historicization of Native Americans, aims to decenter the history of North America by studying it from regions located in the interior of the continent. These spaces are thus no longer seen, as in the past, as peripheries destined for inevitable conquest. Such a perspective, we can note, echoes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of a “Conradian” period in American history, “varying from a few decades to a few centuries, during which Indigenous cultures and those of invaders or colonizers coexisted, forging relationships that were sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, and where the fate of the former was not definitively sealed.”Footnote ⁵ In The Comanche Empire, with undeniable storytelling talent, Hämäläinen emphasized the need to break with the linear model of Frontier history to show that America long remained an Indigenous world. In his new book, whose narrative is organized into twenty-eight short chapters stretching from the peopling of the subcontinent nearly twenty thousand years ago to the end of the Indian Wars in 1890, the same argument is hammered home: to speak too hastily of colonial America is to succumb to teleology. The aim is to offer “a new account of American history by challenging the notion that colonial expansion was inevitable and that colonialism defined the continent, as well as the experiences of those living on it.”Footnote ⁶ The proposition, however stimulating, is certainly not new, but the book’s purpose seems to be to synthesize several centuries of history for a general audience.

With The Rediscovery of America, divided into twelve substantial chapters, Blackhawk demonstrates even greater ambition, as his title suggests. The author states his intent to forge “a new theory of American history”Footnote ⁷ based on two main ideas: first, that European settlement amounted to a permanent dispossession of Native Americans; second, that “race” constitutes the sole true driving force of history. The book advocates a historiographical revolution, with “new concepts, approaches, and commitments.” According to its author, “[i]t is time to put down the interpretive tools of the previous century and take up new ones.”Footnote ⁸ Our naive faith in the cumulative potential of research—research on Native Americans has been developing for over a century and a half—thus finds itself shaken. Not only is this an epistemological turning point, he goes on, but Native Americans are at the forefront: “It is a simultaneous challenge and opportunity, one that falls particularly hard on tribal members who continue to bear the burdens of explaining Indigenous experiences, history, and policies to non-Native peoples.”Footnote ⁹ In stark opposition to the “view from afar” once theorized by Lévi-Strauss,Footnote ¹⁰ such a postulate above all undermines one of the founding principles of the social sciences: that any researcher, regardless of their origin, can work on any subject, provided they do so with an adequate methodology. Entangled “in the framework of European discovery and European ‘greatness,’”Footnote ¹¹ twentieth-century historiography, continues Blackhawk, must give way to an inclusive narrative centered on the theme of encounter: “Encounter—rather than discovery—must structure America’s origins story.”Footnote ¹² Until now, he states somewhat perplexingly, “historians” have remained silent on the dispossession of the IndiansFootnote ¹³ and have failed to establish a link between this dispossession and the rise of African American slaveryFootnote ¹⁴; the prophet Neolin and the Ottawa chief Pontiac have been left “out of history”Footnote ¹⁵ and the ravages of the European diseases largely ignored.Footnote ¹⁶ Several works published since the 1970s, however, refute these assertions.Footnote ¹⁷

Of course, Blackhawk is right to denounce the persistent disinterest of some of his colleagues in Native Americans. He is quite justified, for instance, in criticizing Jill Lepore’s latest work, These Truths: A History of the United States,Footnote ¹⁸ which, by focusing on the themes of slavery and freedom, completely ignores the tragic history of Indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, we are no longer in the situation of the late 1960s, when the Sioux intellectual Vine Deloria Jr., a leading voice of the Red Power movement, could lament “the ‘cameo’ theory of history,” that is, the reduction of Native Americans, as in most Westerns, to inconsequential roles within the grand expansionist narrative of the United States.Footnote ¹⁹ For half a century, dozens of authors have taken up the theme of “encounter” while striving to highlight Indigenous perspectives. Gone, then, is the era of a triumphalist colonial narrative in which Europeans “discovered” and developed a “virgin” continent harboring primitive societies. This kind of ethnocentric and evolutionist narrative has been abandoned in favor of studying tribal history, intercultural interactions, and the catastrophic impact of European colonization on Native Americans. In “Colonial America Without the Indians,” a short essay of counterfactual history published in 1987, James Axtell, for example, emphasized the crucial role of Indigenous peoples in American history.Footnote ²⁰ Should we then continue to view the New Indian History as a mere niche, an academic “ghetto” that has always operated in isolation, without any influence on the standard narrative of American history?Footnote ²¹ In a 2005 article, “Look How Far We’ve Come: How American Indian History Changed the Study of American History in the 1990s,”Footnote ²² even Blackhawk expressed a more optimistic view of the field. Is the focus now on dramatizing the significance of a turning point that he himself wishes to embody?

As in his first book, Violence over the Land—in this respect, he maintains his guiding principle—Blackhawk takes colonial violence as his subject. He studies it using a concept that has been in vogue in recent years: settler colonialism.Footnote ²³ According to this model, which has the drawback of flattening out the depth and complexity of history,Footnote ²⁴ the colonial logic, in North America as elsewhere, was determined not by exploitation of the labor and resources of Indigenous peoples, but rather by their elimination through genocide or ethnic cleansing. The Yale historian nevertheless distinguishes himself from this current on one point, thus avoiding succumbing to victimology or, worse, the trope of the “vanishing Indian”Footnote ²⁵: in his view, setter colonial studies tend to minimize “the extent of Indigenous power and agency.”Footnote ²⁶

Ultimately, one of the challenges of writing Native American history is finding a balance between two opposing approaches, which I will deliberately force a little here. One, teleological, posits that colonization is inherently criminal, and that Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies marked the beginning of five centuries of genocide. Such a perspective has the effect of flattening history and conflating a myriad of regimes—as well as spaces—of interaction into a single model. The other approach argues that Native American nations long managed to remain in control and escape the process of dispossession, to the point of being dominant themselves and marginalizing the European colonies. The works of Blackhawk and Hämäläinen perfectly embody this opposition. The former, paying little attention to the variety of modes of intrusion, tends to see colonization as an inexorable and destructive process from the very outset, while the latter insists on the hegemony of Native American political formations, at the risk of underestimating the capacity of European powers to establish mechanisms of power and dependence at their expense. This is one of the problems inherent in the field: how to consider simultaneously the fact that Indigenous nations maintained their autonomy over a long period and the historical forces, such as the uninterrupted flow of colonial settlement in the nineteenth century, which led to their weakening, if not their outright disappearance?

The Rediscovery of America follows in the footsteps of the bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by the American amateur historian Dee Brown.Footnote ²⁷ Despite a somewhat emotional tone, this remarkable book highlighted the brutality of the colonial conquest suffered by Native Americans. The risk of focusing solely on this aspect, however, is a loss of complexity: what, for example, of the persistence of inter-Indigenous conflicts or the structuring role of war in these societies? In Blackhawk’s account, Samuel de Champlain takes on the characteristics of a conquistador: “Champlain used violence not only to subjugate Native peoples, but also to stabilize his authority.”Footnote ²⁸ In reality, as Blackhawk barely acknowledges, the founder of Quebec primarily waged war against the Iroquois to satisfy the pressing demands of his Montagnais and Algonquin allies. He was therefore less, in this instance, the instigator of violence than a pawn in Indigenous rivalries. For Blackhawk, the 1609 battle against the Iroquois represented a turning point in the art of warfare on a continental scale: the actions of the Saintonge-born explorer are said to have transformed America into a “cauldron of violence.” “Champlain’s first cracks of fire initiated infernos of transformation,” he adds, stating that “violence was as necessary for French expansion as rain was for its vineyards,”Footnote ²⁹ without explaining the unique nature of this violence. In fact, French expansion relied on extensive diplomatic and commercial alliances, which obviously did not preclude wars and the use of military expeditions to weaken or even attempt to destroy certain Indian nations. If the thesis of settler colonialism does not apply to New France, it is because this region was the scene of strong interdependence between colonists and Native American peoples.Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, his evocation of a “continent-wide displacement of Algonquian peoples,”Footnote ³¹ which attempts to convey the subjugation of Native Americans in the Northeast, seems to me excessive.Footnote ³²

What, then, of the book’s premise of the “unmaking of US history”? It is only partially fulfilled, as the critique of the colonial perspective of traditional narratives is paradoxically accompanied by a reproduction of the framework of discovery and conquest. This is evident in its account of the sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions to the southern United States, which are not studied from an Indigenous perspective but rather from that of the conquistadors. It is not until Chapter 4 that the Native American point of view, specifically that of the Mandan, is foregrounded. Chapter 6, devoted to the US Revolutionary period, begins with a discussion of George Washington, who occupies a more prominent place in the book than any Indigenous figure. The author shows little interest in the traditional lifestyles of Native Americans, whether subsistence activities, social organizations, rituals, or forms of dualism—in other words, the research themes of classical anthropology, which aimed not only to describe the diversity of cultures but also to try to understand them from within. To put it another way, he only considers Native Americans from the moment they are threatened with annihilation. Yet Blackhawk adds another nuance: destructive as colonization was, it did not prevent Indigenous peoples from remaining extremely powerful, beginning with the Iroquois in the Northeast: “It was the Iroquois—not the French, the Dutch, or the English—who expanded into the headwaters of the Ohio River, which flows to the Mississippi.”Footnote ³³ It is as if the author is caught between two imperatives, which sometimes prove contradictory: defending the thesis of settler colonialism and highlighting the significant agency possessed by the Indians.

That last quotation could just as easily have come from the pen of Hämäläinen. Overturning the traditional colonial narrative, as well as Brown’s tragic vision, Hämäläinen passionately recounts the conquering history of several major Indigenous groups, including the Powhatan and Iroquois in the east and the Comanche and Sioux in the west, the latter two building their “empires” thanks to their spectacular conversion to the equestrian way of life. While the historiography has always emphasized the singular power of the Iroquois in Indigenous America (the result, in my view, of an imbalance in the sources), this hegemony has never been so emphatically highlighted as it is in Indigenous Continent.Footnote ³⁴ According to Hämäläinen, “the Saint Lawrence Valley was not a French possession” but the northern edge of Iroquois territory.Footnote ³⁵ Similarly, he argues that the British colonies evolved within the Iroquois sphere of influence, and the Spanish colonies within that of the Comanche. But was the inverse not partly true as well? Hämäläinen, in my opinion, elides the process by which the agents of colonial power, despite the enduring autonomy of the Indigenous peoples and the persistence of their worldview, deployed mechanisms of exploitation and sometimes domination across American territory: the fur trade, for example, inevitably fueled dependence, as did the policy of gift-giving to Native American chiefs; Indigenous peoples found themselves embroiled in conflicts between Europeans without always fully grasping the stakes; and, of course, the decimation wreaked by epidemics of European origin dramatically diminished their demographic potential.Footnote ³⁶

More nuanced than Blackhawk, however, Hämäläinen stresses the variety of regimes of interaction and gives greater consideration to wars between Indigenous peoples. His narrative, essentially military and diplomatic, is conducted at breakneck speed,Footnote ³⁷ in an epic manner recalling Parkman, had the latter recentered the vicissitudes of colonial history on the theater of Indigenous power. But the style, often emphatic, sometimes veers into simplification: at the dawn of the first millennium CE, we read, “shamans … traveled along roads and waterways, seeking and sharing knowledge and rites that helped them to balance the universe”Footnote ³⁸; the Iroquois expansion in the Great Lakes becomes “the first large-scale westward expansion in early American history”; the Iroquois wars changed “the face of the North American interior almost beyond recognition”Footnote ³⁹; the French, by building three forts on the edge of Sioux country around 1750, “had created an instant Indigenous superpower that would change American history irrevocably.”Footnote ⁴⁰ While Blackhawk emphasizes the theme of dispossession, Hämäläinen offers instead a saga of sound and fury that celebrates the total power of Indigenous peoples. While this perspective has the advantage of debunking the idea of an inevitable conquest, it tends to underestimate the asymmetry of demographic dynamics. It should be noted, for example, that by 1800, the Indigenous population of what is now the United States had already dwindled to 600,000 individuals (from approximately five million in 1492), compared to more than five million colonists and slaves.Footnote ⁴¹

Hämäläinen also recounts a history of resistance and resilience, embodied in the vocabulary of “rebellion,”Footnote ⁴² a term in my opinion ill suited to convey the independence of Indigenous people. Similarly, the notions of “superpower” and “resistance,” proclaimed in this way, seem to contradict each other. In a new paradox that seems to warrant explanation, the author interprets the creation of reservations by the federal government as “a sign of American weakness, not strength.”Footnote ⁴³ Strangely, the most objective forms of colonial domination are interpreted as a mark of Euro-American impotence and the stunning success of Indigenous resistance. The book, moreover, ends somewhat abruptly, as the indigeneity of the North American subcontinent seems to disintegrate suddenly in the wake of the conquest of the Plains by the United States.

For his part, Blackhawk emphasizes the enduring political legacy of Indigenous nations. Indeed, it is in the second part of his book, when he addresses the legal dimension of Native American history and the influence of the Native American question in the construction of the United States, that he is most convincing. He explains that the practice of treaties, formalized by the 1787 Constitution, helped define American political culture. He also admirably examines the establishment of reservations and the assimilation campaigns of the 1880s–1920s, as well as their detrimental effects on Indigenous family structures. Yet in the final chapter of the book, devoted to the post-1945 period, Blackhawk draws a parallel that could have been more precisely explained between the Nazi project of expansion in Eastern Europe and the conquest of the American West, synonymous with the near-extermination of Native Americans. To do so, he relies on the comparison made by Hitler himself, who “praised the U.S. government for having ‘gunned down the millions’ of Native Americans ‘to [only] a few hundred thousand.’”Footnote ⁴⁴ Highlighting the führer’s admiration for the United States’ expansionist model and, more specifically, for the enormous reduction of the Native American population is one thing.Footnote ⁴⁵ Implying that the Americans acted in the same way as the Nazis, by systematically massacring millions of people, is quite another. In fact, the lack of contextualization renders the comparison specious.

This ambiguity allows Blackhawk to bolster his argument that the war waged against the Sioux in the 1860s was not merely one of subjugation but amounted to “genocide.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Hämäläinen also uses this analytical framework: “In the 1890s, the number of remaining Indians was 250,000—a terrifyingly low figure that reveals the enormity of U.S. genocidal campaigns.”Footnote ⁴⁷ As early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he states, English colonies had conducted “genocidal policies.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Is that to say, policies of conquest and subjugation that, through their radical violence, tended to destroy Indigenous populations? Or policies aimed at the extermination of a people because of their very existence, which implies the planned slaughter of all its members? Clarification would be valuable, as these two different practices do not necessarily belong on a continuum. It is clear that within US (and Canadian) historiography, the use of the word “genocide,” first brought to the fore in the 1990s, has recently become commonplace, as illustrated in particular by Jeffrey Ostler’s book Surviving Genocide, a study of US Indian policy from 1776 to 1850.Footnote ⁴⁹ Rather than signaling a resolutely comparative approach, the use of this term presupposes a teleological will, on the part of the colonizers, to annihilate Native Americans for their very nature. For other researchers, however, more rigorous in their analysis of the variety of dynamics of destructive violence, the existence of genocide is well attested in North America only in the case of California in the 1850s.Footnote ⁵⁰ This does not in any way prevent us from recognizing, on the scale of the subcontinent and especially in the nineteenth century, the implementation by colonial governments of brutal wars of conquest, of operations aimed at expelling populations from their territories and confining them to reserves, and of policies seeking to eradicate their traditional cultures.

The Erasure of Cultural Difference

While the historiography of Native Americans has largely embraced the theme of agency, it is more divided regarding the interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ rationale for action. On this issue, Blackhawk and Hämäläinen agree, albeit imperfectly, as we shall see. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the academic perspective that focuses on differences between cultures has been marginalized. Indeed, reflecting on these differences appears to be seen as perpetuating the colonial legacy. Such a stance is not without its difficulties for the social sciences. Philippe Descola points out that “it is now hard to refer to any difference between Us and Others without finding oneself accused of imperialistic arrogance, incipient racism, or impenitent nostalgia for the past”; Emmanuel Désveaux laments that the new US historiographical school denies Native Americans “in their otherness” and elides “the cultural dimension of social reality.”Footnote ⁵¹ The dominant approach today can be described as “rationalist.” It presupposes the universality of certain modes of perception and behavior, particularly with regard to self-interest and calculation. Survive, grow, conquer, and dominate: this is presented as the fundamental repertoire of human actions, transcending the diversity of peoples. This conception of a universal practical reason portrays North American Indians as avatars of Europeans, endowed with common characteristics such as a sense of history, a propensity to establish empires, or a predisposition to embrace the market economy. Ultimately, the current historicization of Native Americans has the collateral effect of flattening all cultural difference, at the risk of distorting history. Indigenous Continent and, even more so, The Rediscovery of America illustrate this trend. The question of language, fundamental to the anthropological discipline,Footnote ⁵² is not addressed in either work, whether in terms of its relation to culture, according to the approach of Edward Sapir,Footnote ⁵³ or its capacity to classify the entities of the world. The challenges posed by linguistic decline are also neglected.Footnote ⁵⁴ Has language, once so central to defining Native American identities, become a blind spot in the field?

With the tools offered by anthropology relegated to the attic of history, it seems that the sophistication of Native American societies, as well as their specific historical dynamics, can now only be understood in relation to the Western conceptual and historical framework. “The Pueblo Revolt [1680] was arguably the first American Revolution,”Footnote ⁵⁵ Blackhawk asserts, without further explaining the word “revolution,” however loaded it may be here. Indeed, what does this term mean in the context of a traditional society? The expression “Native feminisms,”Footnote ⁵⁶ borrowed from Native American female scholars, also gives pause: were the Indigenous societies of North America, where the social separation of men and women was often very strict, but which lacked any clear male domination over women,Footnote ⁵⁷ always driven by feminist ideals, independent of any Euro-American influence? When, moreover, Blackhawk speaks of “Indigenous jurisdictions,”Footnote ⁵⁸ one regrets that he does not elaborate further: is the Native American conception of territory and sovereignty self-evident?

It is true that Hämäläinen is much more concerned with highlighting Native American specificities, whether the crucial role of kinship in the social fabric or the relative permeability between the world of humans and that of animals. In the first chapter of his book, he draws on anthropologists such as James Mooney (1861–1921), on the subject of the Cherokee, and George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938), in regard to the Pawnee. But this welcome sensitivity does not, by any means, permeate the entirety of his argument. The use of the term “empire” to characterize the Comanche, Iroquois, and Sioux political entities thus struggles to convey their fluidity and acephalous nature. Far from constituting an empire or even a confederation, the Comanche, lacking a central authority, formed rather a constellation of groups, united by unstable alliances.Footnote ⁵⁹ Furthermore, the author of Indigenous Continent establishes a questionable equivalence between various “wars of independence,” arguing that these, “both Indigenous and Anglo-American, … were about respect, resources, land, and sovereignty,”Footnote ⁶⁰ as well as between European nations’ appetite for power and that of Indian “empires.” He states that the domination exercised by the city of Cahokia in the upper Mississippi Valley in the thirteenth century “resembled the ambitions of Europe’s medieval barons and other nobility who strove to control scattered castles and contested territories,”Footnote ⁶¹ as if the point of reference has to remain invariably European.

This leveling perspective proves paradoxical in that it seems to reawaken the specter of ethnocentrism. It is reflected in the two authors’ use of the term “soldier” to designate Native American combatants, rather than “warrior,” suspected of belonging to the language of colonialism. A profession within a chain of command (the soldier in European armies, i.e., military personnel receiving pay, or solde) is thus assimilated to a way of life which, besides potentially encompassing the entirely of the male sex among Native Americans, strongly valued individual exploits. In Hämäläinen’s text, Iroquois “soldiers” wear “war uniforms”Footnote ⁶² while the Caddo deploy “border patrols.”Footnote ⁶³ This evolution of the lexicon signals that the new Native American history has entered a second phase, much more radical than the first, which simply sought to abandon terms deemed ethnocentric, even pejorative (even if they were not always used that way in the sources), such as “tribe,” “redskin,” “squaw,” and “backcountry.” Today, it is no longer a question of sanitizing the vocabulary, whether colonial or sociological, but rather of distorting it or, better yet, diverting it in order to reinvest it in another civilizational context. Such an approach distances us from any understanding of the singularity of Native Americans, stripping them of their cultural attributes. How can one not be struck by the peremptory nature of the remarks of the former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Nancy Shoemaker, who, contrary to the anthropological approach of Marshall Sahlins, recently stated: “I have always been more intrigued by human commonalities, so less interested in ‘how natives think’ than in ‘how people think.’”Footnote ⁶⁴

History and Anthropology: A Complementarity Under Strain?

Let us try to understand this rupture between Native American history and anthropology. Is the latter suffering from its original sin, namely its institutionalization in a colonial context at the turn of the twentieth century? The two disciplines nourished each other for nearly a century, and it seems useful to review this long collaboration to understand what is at stake today. As we know, anthropology became professionalized in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century through the study of the first inhabitants of North America, whose cultures were perceived as threatened with extinction. Breaking with evolutionism, American anthropologists such as Franz Boas and his followers, Clark D. Wissler, Alfred L. Kroeber, John R. Swanton, Paul Radin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Robert H. Lowie produced numerous ethnographic and linguistic studies, in which they described both the strangeness and the sophistication of Native American cultures.Footnote ⁶⁵ These studies were recorded in hundreds of publications—annual reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, as well as its bulletins and miscellaneous publications—which, as Lévi-Strauss noted in 1965, constituted “a collection of native texts and factual observations … so impressive that, after nearly a century of use, only its surface has been scratched.”Footnote ⁶⁶

From the 1930s onward, these same ethnologists turned to history, which they saw as a key to understanding cultural diversity. Questioning how wars, migrations, and contact between populations had altered cultures, they examined the changes that had occurred in Indigenous societies since their first encounters with Europeans. After the Second World War, several anthropologists, including Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, served as expert witnesses in the trials initiated by the Indian Claims Commission, established in 1946. To support the territorial claims of various Indigenous groups, they began to seek evidence of their historical continuity in colonial sources. This work, which gave rise to the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1954, held a promise: to forge a better understanding of traditional Native American societies and their relationships with colonial powers by combining the methods of history and anthropology. One of the leading figures of ethnohistory, William N. Fenton, theorized what he termed “upstreaming,” juxtaposing his fieldwork among the Seneca, one of the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, whose language he had learned, with the actions of their ancestors as recounted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and English sources—a technique later adopted by Nathan Wachtel in his study of the Indians of Peru.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1953, Fenton issued a call in Williamsburg, Virginia, a bastion of American colonial history and home of the William and Mary Quarterly, for cooperation between history and anthropology. It would nevertheless take some twenty years for this call to be truly heeded by historians.

This historiographical shift fostered the emergence of diverse research topics, such as the fur trade in Canada, the relationship of Indigenous peoples to the land and environment, their reactions to evangelization efforts, epidemics, treaties between Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans, and Native conceptions of the past. Among the most imaginative historians of this movement, Calvin Martin, for example, drew on anthropology to reexamine Indian peoples’ supposed overexploitation of animals during the era of the fur trade. He suggested that this overexploitation was not a consequence of their dependence on European goods, but marked the breakdown of the spiritual contract between hunters and their prey; blaming animals for the epidemics that had raged through their societies, the Native Americans decided to wage a war of destruction against them. This thesis, although difficult to prove, at least has the merit of taking into account both the epidemiological shock and the question of animism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ethnohistory was also used productively in the United States by Raymond J. DeMallie, anthropologist of the Sioux, who sought to write a history of the Indians fundamentally rooted in the culture of its actors, and in Canada by Toby Morantz, an anthropologist of the Cree who showed that the fur trade in the Subarctic region did not alter the cultural foundations of Native American society. Their method relied at once on fieldwork and linguistic knowledge and on the examination of colonial archives, rich in information concerning Indigenous peoples.Footnote ⁶⁹ The almost encyclopedic undertaking of the Handbook of North American Indians, each volume of which is devoted to a specific area (California, Northeast, Plateau, Great Basin, Plains, Southwest, Southeast, Northwest Coast, Subarctic, and Arctic) or to a particular topic (the history of Indian-White relations, languages, Indians in contemporary society, and environment, origins, and population), is also emblematic of this research current, attentive to the cultural singularity of each Indigenous population as well as to their turbulent history with European colonialism.Footnote ⁷⁰

A first break with this historical approach, so closely linked to classical anthropology, occurred in the 1990s with the rise of the New Indian History, and as the somewhat catch-all term “agency” became increasingly used to describe the motivations and strategies of Native Americans. Richard White, whose book The Middle Ground confidently refuted Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier thesis,Footnote ⁷¹ also denounced the approaches, deemed ahistorical, of Lévi-Strauss, of DeMallie and especially of Martin, arguing that they essentialized Native Americans and depicted them as passive beings, bogged down in tradition.Footnote ⁷² While not insensitive to the cultural roots of Indigenous peoples, White criticized any rhetoric of otherness and dismissed the idea of lasting cultural differences between societies.Footnote ⁷³ It is interesting that this position echoes that of Gananath Obeyesekere, the Sri Lankan academic embroiled at just that moment in a major controversy among anthropologists, after disagreeing with Sahlins’s interpretation of the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii in 1779. Sahlins considered that Cook, assimilated to a local god, transgressed the Hawaiian ritual calendar, which explained his brutal death; Obeyesekere, adopting a postcolonial stance, argued that the Polynesians, rather than confusing myth and reality, killed the English explorer as an act of resistance against colonialism.Footnote ⁷⁴

That being said, it would perhaps be fairer to state that White embodied an intermediary position, because he was at the same time concerned about the breakthrough of Native Voices—a North American variation of Subaltern Studies—which sought to “decolonize” academia and engage in a radical critique of “historicists,” who, like White, were legitimately striving to promote American Indian history but found themselves accused of perpetuating a colonialist narrative disconnected from any “tribal” reading. Believing themselves better positioned than “Whites” to describe the traumatic experience of Native Americans, some scholars who identified as Indigenous—most often relying on the official blood quantum index, imposed with the creation of reservations by the US federal administration—sought to reserve the writing of this history to themselves, in a posture of resistance. Their work was based on the rejection of colonial sources, which they considered to offer at best only discourses on Indianness, and on an approach that highly valued oral traditions, whose authenticity supposedly guaranteed their veracity, regardless of context and the date at which they were pronounced. This irruption of race (or what is conceived as such) into the academic field may seem paradoxical for two reasons: first, because Indians were traditionally unfamiliar with this conceptFootnote ⁷⁵ (it was borrowed from Euro-Americans between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries); second, because their dispossession in the nineteenth century was precisely based on their racialization. As DeMallie explained, “In effect, after centuries of being stigmatized by Euro-Americans as an inferior ‘race,’ some Native American intellectuals are coopting the concept of race to use as a weapon against perceived oppression.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, “decolonial” or “autohistorical” approaches have flourished, particularly within the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA, founded in 2007), which, like the ethnohistory of the past, seeks to historicize Native Americans and restore their perspective, but at the cost, on the one hand, of a rejection of cultural anthropology, and, on the other, of a declared commitment to Indigenous communities, which must be accompanied by a right of oversight, if not control, for those being studied over the research itself. The politicization of the field has even led to the creation of a distinct status, that of “Indigenous scholar,” at the basis of a new epistemological foundation.Footnote ⁷⁷ Skeptical of this trend, historian David J. Silverman, a specialist in the Native Americans of New England, recently wrote: “I … question whether, in the long run, recasting history in the interest of modern sensibilities has much to offer to Indigenous communities.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, the challenge is significant: how can an ethnologist continue to conduct fieldwork without becoming merely a spokesperson for Indigenous communities? How can we relate the tragedies of Native American history without succumbing to the pitfall of victimhood, which contradicts the very notion of historical actors’ agency? And, more generally, since this extends beyond Native American studies, how can we avoid the trap of “presentism,” which transforms the past into a palimpsest of contemporary political struggles?Footnote ⁷⁹

Given the inevitable success of their volumes, Blackhawk and Hämäläinen deliver a kind of death blow to the ethnohistory of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as to the classical anthropology upon which it rested. In his reflection on Native American activism at the end of the nineteenth century, Blackhawk thus chooses to denounce, in passing, “salvage” ethnography. That said, he does mention the crucial role played by Indigenous informants in the birth of cultural anthropology. George Hunt, Boas’s collaborator, is even presented as a true theorist of his culture: “Boas learned from Hunt that ethnic and cultural values were fluid rather than fixed. They could also bridge rather than divide communities.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This apparent rejection of ethnography, as practiced by Americans, is expressed even more harshly by Hämäläinen at the very end of his book, when he evokes the interviews with Apache women conducted by the American officer John Gregory Bourke in the 1880s at Fort Sill (Oklahoma): “Bourke wanted to rescue Apache lore before it vanished, but he failed to realize that Apache history and traditions did not need his rescue efforts.”Footnote ⁸¹ A shot across the bows of the anthropologist if ever there was one.

Is this to say that a history of the California Indians is conceivable without referring to Kroeber’s seminal work on the subject?Footnote ⁸² That Swanton’s ethnographic work on the Creek has nothing to teach historians?Footnote ⁸³ That the Natchez scholar Archie Sam, in the 1970s, was wrong to rejoice in the linguistic work carried out forty years earlier by Victor E. Riste and Mary R. Haas among the last speakers of his nation?Footnote ⁸⁴ Or that the scholarship on the Plains by Alice C. Fletcher, a pioneer of participant observation, in the 1880s, and by DeMallie, in collaboration with Deloria Jr., a century later, is consigned to obsolescence? Should we not instead make the most of this textual heritage, composed of myths, animal stories, kinship terminology, descriptions of rituals, and historical anecdotes, and use it as a repository of data to better decipher the colonial corpus? If we judge that the knowledge produced, since time immemorial, by Native Americans about themselves is sufficient in isolation, we also risk assimilating very diverse modes of historicity, contrary to DeMallie who, in the Boasian tradition, wrote that “every cultural tradition, each linguistic group, has its own particular sense of the past.”Footnote ⁸⁵ It may seem paradoxical that some historians of Native Americans today tend to reject academic anthropology, now largely preserved and fixed in textual form, even as they readily draw on the rich documentation produced by previous centuries. A priori, colonial sources from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries do not reflect Indigenous perspectives as clearly as later ethnographies.

Recent historiography has played an important role in consolidating the status of Native Americans as full-fledged protagonists in North American history, but this normalization has also, to varying degrees, sanctioned the abandonment of a form of anthropology concerned with rendering the cultural integrity of Indigenous peoples. In the early 1990s, while serving as president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, DeMallie noted that anthropologists and historians “need to listen to one another and keep [their] ears open.”Footnote ⁸⁶ That undertaking, which relies on the critical use of colonial archives, ethnographic and linguistic studies, Indian narratives (insofar as they can still be collected), archaeological data, and anthropological theory, is an ongoing one, as evidenced, for example, in the work of anthropologist and historian Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, a specialist in the Comanche.Footnote ⁸⁷ Indeed, historians of North America should be striving to “scratch the surface,” to use Lévi-Strauss’s expression, of the immense corpus bequeathed by classical anthropology, rather than trying at all costs to dissolve the otherness of Native Americans in the grand narrative of globalization.