Two Issues in the Writing of American Indian History. A Review Article

Abstract

These four books were selected to sample the products of contemporary Americanist anthropology (studies of American Indians primarily by Americans). According to Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel, writing in 1960, Americanist studies had a Golden Age from 1880 to 1920 of which 1900 to 1920 was the Classic Period. Those periods were encompassed and dominated by the career of Franz Boas (b. 1858, d. 1942). On the basis of works published in the '30s, a somewhat longer period might be accorded to the Golden Age, say until 1940, but the fact is that Indians were made citizens of the United States in 1924 and were given constitutional governments in the 1930s. 1880, the commencement of the Age, is a fair date for the end of the last free roaming of western Indians (in the east this happened sooner). The Age's 40year duration was the twilight time in which the old ways were still well remembered, and the period that was remembered was called the Ethnographic Present. After 1920, whites and Indians alike were forced to call that period history. But Boasian Americanism was meant to be history. Its studies were meant to describe the fullness of Indian cultures as they were immediately before European disruption and to reconstruct the history of the creation of that fullness to a time depth of about 500 years. These anthropologists were endlessly concerned with origins, not ultimate origins on a scale of thousands of years such as fascinated evolutionists, but short term origins of a spreading myth, a ceremonial pattern, or an architectural style: longer histories than an Indian would know, but within the grasp of science. The preferred unit of