A Reintroduction to Native American Histories

Content Warnings.

Discussions of racism, colonization, and genocide.

In weeks two and three of the semester, coursework pertained to the histories of Native Americans in the Americas from the perspectives of the ranges of Native American peoples and the burgeoning settler governments that established themselves in the common era. Some focused on the former viewpoint. Many other cases analyzed the latter with an outsider’s gaze, criticizing and discrediting the history laid out by the governing perspective. 

Bonnie and Eduardo Duran and Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart’s essay, “Native Americans and the Trauma of History” is one of few which spotlighted Native Americans in history. The essay focuses on a study on intergenerational trauma derived from colonial and postcolonial life, the effects of a colonialist society on its most invalidated groups, and how those members are attempting to treat it today. One method the essayists suggest is education on the community’s historical trauma and collective acknowledgement and grief, with a particular analysis on this and other methods’ effects on those affected by the Wounded Knee massacre.

Other readings apply the Durans’ and Heart’s method to the broader educational system under that society today. In “Red Eyes”, the fourth chapter of James W. Loewen’s critique of American history textbooks, Loewen criticizes the homogenized portrayal of Native Americans and their histories of interactions with colonists in American education. He stresses that historians and publishers should not sanitize Native American histories even for the sake of national pride and sympathy, but present it as it was, regardless of how upsetting it may be to the nation. Philip J. Deloria also studies his critique of the “primitive” and “savage” depiction of Native Americans in history. In an introduction called “Expectation and Anomaly”, Deloria analyzes the non-Native, American opinion on Native Americans and the historical and cultural biases and prejudices which underlie them. Deloria explains non-Natives should critically examine their expectations instead of stereotypes, view cultural histories from the lens of another individual, and question what constitutes a historical anomaly.

Last, educators such as Allison Herrera (Indigenous educators fight for an accurate history of California), Jeffrey Ostler (A Valley of Death), and David Treuer (The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee) challenge the histories and stereotypes discussed by Loewen and Deloria directly: they study the evidence of Native Americans through American history and dispute the testimonies of settlers who dictated their academic depiction. The first chapter of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, “Narrating the Apocalypse”, follows hypotheses, archaeological evidence, and Native American cosmology that forms modern knowledge on prehistoric Native Americans, and it highlights the nuances and differences of several groups before colonization. And both “Narrating the Apocalypse” and A Valley of Death review and challenge the words of colonists and American figures who fought and deceived Native Americans up until 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee massacre.

Perhaps the concept I would use to encompass the readings of these two weeks is heterogeneity. Heterogeneity is defined as the presence of diversity or difference in the elements that form a broader topic. In this case, the concept exemplifies the attempts of each text to expand and reshape the modern American, non-Native viewpoint of Native Americans. American education publishes a monolithic depiction of Native American people and the colonizers who interacted with them. It implies that upon contact, Native Americans were wild, dangerous, and alien (Loewen, 1995). It implies their culture and their knowledge was “uncivilized”, a Eurocentric viewpoint that diminishes the qualities of Native American peoples (Loewen, 1995). Instead of repeating this perspective, the texts expand on the cultures of the people who existed before colonization. Treuer (2019) partitions his overviews of Native American groups by physiological region instead of state or country, avoiding the political boundaries which are incompatible with the mobile lifestyles of Native tribes. He differentiates tribes by name, culture, history, and the interactions each held in precolonial and colonial times. In comparison, Treur (2019) portrays many of the settlers he mentions not like those made famous by the story of Pocahontas and war veterans’ tales, but as materialistic and violent. Texts highlight the consequences of colonial attempts to civilize and assimilate Native Americans in under 400 years and the resulting “cultural genocide” which fractured many tribes’ sense of identity (Duran et al., 1998).

And, although this is an expanded view of American history, it is simultaneously necessary to remember that history is complex. In the words of one author, “What happened is more complex than [telling Indian history as a parade of white villains], so the history we tell must be more complex” (Loewen, 1995, p. 126). Some settlers, including the legislative branch, found in favor of Native Americans; some Natives, including those of the Osage, worked with the military in wars against other tribes (Treur, 2019). Just as Native Americans cannot be presented as a monolith of naive fools, European and American settlers were not always compelled to subjugation and manipulation, even if their forebears held cruel intent. The complexity of history emphasizes the importance of a full and critical analysis and comprehension of history. When one separates themselves from the culture that forms their personal ideology and bias—in this case, American history, where the culture has been produced by the American government and political system—one can engage with Native histories individually and transformatively (Deloria, 2004). The first step in viewing Native American histories from a genuine and fair standpoint is to view a heterogeneous history that challenges non-Native expectations and to persistently question the homogeneity of preexisting beliefs.