Still Native: The Significance of Native Americans in the History of the Twentieth-Century American West

Abstract

W ehen Frederick Jackson Turner looked at American history in 1893 he considered Native Americans to be of little significance. He demonstrated more interest in the process of heroic, white yeomen hewing out corridor of civilization in an environment that all but overwhelmed them, transforming them from immigrants into Americans. Indians were Indians, part of that wild frontier environment. They posed a common danger and served as a consolidating agent in our history, faceless obstacles to be overcome and subdued in the process of westering.1 Common wisdom and events of the day seemed to justify Turner's perspective. After all, Indian populations were at their low ebb, vanishing vestige of the frontier experience. Turner's contemporaries saw the breakup of Indian reservations and the final promise of assimilation through allotment and agrarian settlement as an eventuality-the ultimate realization of Euro-American belief in the unilinear progress of peoples from savagism to civility.2 One hundred years later, some Americans voice essentially the same attitudes-that modern Indians are unimportant in the larger picture; that they are obstacles in the development of the American West; that they must assimilate or disappear; and that the answer to the Indian problem again lies in abrogating their special relationship with the federal government.