Ethnohistory: A Better Way to Write Indian History

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ent theoretical and methodological orientations, with the predictable result that the Indian emerged as two different individuals. There are two Indians of history, recently mused an eminent anthropologist: one is the Indian of ethnology; the other, the Indian of recent history. The first is the Indian of cultural elements: the snowshoe, puberty ceremonies, kinship organization, and the potlatch. The second is the Indian of the mines, the encomiendas, the missions, and the fur trade.' For the anthropologist - the ethnologist and his intellectual kinsman, the archaeologist - American Indian history begins some forty thousand years ago when the Paleolithic ancestors of the modem Indian wandered across the Bering land bridge (Beringia) into Alaska and filtered down into the rest of the continent, Mesoamerica, and South America. In the ensuing millennia their heirs fashioned cultures and societies uniquely adapted to a range of ecological possibilities coupled with varying degrees of outside influence. It is these internal and external social-cultural arrangements and adjustments that the anthropologist makes the object of his investigation. Moreover, the anthropologist brings to the study of American Indians a staggering time depth against which the past four hundred years seems but a drop in the bucket, albeit a momentous one.