Intelligence operations, Indigenous cultures, and early U.S. Ambassadors to Native American polities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article extends scholars’ recent integration of the history of U.S.-Indigenous relations into the history of American foreign relations by addressing the state’s attempts to acquire information about Native people’s ways of perceiving reality. My focus is on the intertwined careers in policymaking and scholarship of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft used his position as U.S. ambassador (‘Indian agent’) to the Ojibwe people to become the government’s leading expert on Indigenous cultures. The cultural information officials like Schoolcraft gathered was tightly connected to matters of national security, with significant implications for both international relations and the discipline now known as anthropology.