A Moral History of Indian-White Relations Revisited

Abstract

IN SPITE of the media attention accorded the second battle of Wounded Knee, the guilt-ridden popularity of Vine Deloria's books, and the film cult of Billy Jack, the history of Indian-white relations has arrived in Academe. Like the blacks and women who slightly preceded them, the American Indians can no longer be ignored in our lectures, textbooks, journals, or-need we say-scholarly meetings. They have arrived, not because the popular culture adopted them in the late 1960s and '70s (as it had in other generations for other reasons) nor because their well-publicized militancy forced intellectual as well as political concessions, but because rank-and-file historians in increasing numbers realize that the full and faithful story of America cannot be told without them. But the new arrivals are not the stereotypical savages of the past, noble or ignoble. Rather than faceless features of geography or players of bit parts in a blanched scenario of nation-building, the Indians are seen today as active determinants of American history, at center stage, not in the wings, of our social experience and cultural identity. The major reason for this salutary change in native casting is the scholarly direction of ethnohistory, which since the late 1940s has forced the American judiciary and, more recently, American historians to confront the reality of native societies on their own cultural terms. In forcing us to recognize the distinctive human faces on both sides of our historical frontiers, however, ethnohistorians