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  3. Studies in North American Indian History

This series is designed to exemplify new approaches to the Native American past. In recent years scholars have begun to appreciate the extent to which Indians, whose cultural roots extended back for thousands of years, shaped the North American landscape as encountered by successive waves of immigrants. In addition, because Native Americans continually adapted their cultural traditions to the realities of the Euro-American presence, their history adds a thread of non-Western experience to the tapestry of American culture. Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History brings outstanding examples of this new scholarship to a broad audience. Books in the series link Native Americans to broad themes in American history and place the Indian experience in the context of social and economic change over time.

  • General Editors: Frederick Hoxie, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Neal Salisbury, Smith College, Massachusetts, Tiya Miles, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ned Blackhawk, Yale University

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13 results in Studies in North American Indian History

Sharks upon the Land
  • Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai'i, 1778–1855
  • Seth Archer
  • Published online:
    12 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018
  • Historian Seth Archer traces the cultural impact of disease and health problems in the Hawaiian Islands from the arrival of Europeans to 1855. Colonialism in Hawaiʻi began with epidemiological incursions, and Archer argues that health remained the national crisis of the islands for more than a century. Introduced diseases resulted in reduced life spans, rising infertility and infant mortality, and persistent poor health for generations of Islanders, leaving a deep imprint on Hawaiian culture and national consciousness. Scholars have noted the role of epidemics in the depopulation of Hawaiʻi and broader Oceania, yet few have considered the interplay between colonialism, health, and culture - including Native religion, medicine, and gender. This study emphasizes Islanders' own ideas about, and responses to, health challenges on the local level. Ultimately, Hawaiʻi provides a case study for health and culture change among Indigenous populations across the Americas and the Pacific.

Return to Kahiki
  • Native Hawaiians in Oceania
  • Kealani Cook
  • Published online:
    24 January 2018
    Print publication:
    25 January 2018
  • Between 1850 and 1907, Native Hawaiians sought to develop relationships with other Pacific Islanders, reflecting how they viewed not only themselves as a people but their wider connections to Oceania and the globe. Kealani Cook analyzes the relatively little known experiences of Native Hawaiian missionaries, diplomats, and travelers, shedding valuable light on the rich but understudied accounts of Hawaiians outside of Hawaiʻi. Native Hawaiian views of other islanders typically corresponded with their particular views and experiences of the Native Hawaiian past. The more positive their outlook, the more likely they were to seek cross-cultural connections. This is an important intervention in the growing field of Pacific and Oceanic history and the study of native peoples of the Americas, where books on indigenous Hawaiians are few and far between. Cook returns the study of Hawai'i to a central place in the history of cultural change in the Pacific.

Property and Dispossession
  • Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America
  • Allan Greer
  • Published online:
    21 December 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018
  • Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.

Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule
  • Matthew Babcock
  • Published online:
    05 September 2016
    Print publication:
    26 September 2016
  • As a definitive study of the poorly understood Apaches de paz, this book explains how war-weary, mutually suspicious Apaches and Spaniards negotiated an ambivalent compromise after 1786 that produced over four decades of uneasy peace across the region. In response to drought and military pressure, thousands of Apaches settled near Spanish presidios in a system of reservation-like establecimientos, or settlements, stretching from Laredo to Tucson. Far more significant than previously assumed, the establecimientos constituted the earliest and most extensive set of military-run reservations in the Americas and served as an important precedent for Indian reservations in the United States. As a case study of indigenous adaptation to imperial power on colonial frontiers and borderlands, this book reveals the importance of Apache-Hispanic diplomacy in reducing cross-cultural violence and the limits of indigenous acculturation and assimilation into empires and states.

Indigenous Intellectuals
  • Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930
  • Kiara M. Vigil
  • Published online:
    05 August 2015
    Print publication:
    15 July 2015
  • In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close readings of texts, images, and public performances, this book examines the literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States. Vigil demonstrates how these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of the United States.

The American Revolution in Indian Country
  • Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities
  • Colin G. Calloway
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    28 April 1995
  • This study presents a broad coverage of Indian experiences in the American Revolution rather than Indian participation as allies or enemies of contending parties. Colin Calloway focuses on eight Indian communities as he explores how the Revolution often translated into war among Indians and their own struggles for independence. Drawing on British, American, Canadian and Spanish records, Calloway shows how Native Americans pursued different strategies, endured a variety of experiences, but were bequeathed a common legacy as result of the Revolution.

Great Lakes Creoles
  • A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750–1860
  • Lucy Eldersveld Murphy
  • Published online:
    05 September 2014
    Print publication:
    15 September 2014
  • A case study of one of America's many multi-ethnic border communities, Great Lakes Creoles builds upon recent research on gender, race, ethnicity, and politics as it examines the ways that the old fur trade families experienced and responded to the colonialism of United States expansion. Lucy Eldersveld Murphy examines Indian history with attention to the pluralistic nature of American communities and the ways that power, gender, race, and ethnicity were contested and negotiated in them. She explores the role of women as mediators shaping key social, economic, and political systems, as well as the creation of civil political institutions and the ways that men of many backgrounds participated in and influenced them. Ultimately, Great Lakes Creoles takes a careful look at Native people and their complex families as active members of an American community in the Great Lakes region.

The Middle Ground
  • Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815
  • Richard White
  • Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    27 September 1991
  • This book steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually conprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic.

The Middle Ground
  • Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815
  • 2nd edition
  • Richard White
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    01 November 2010
  • An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

Faith and Boundaries
  • Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1600–1871
  • David J. Silverman
  • Published online:
    17 December 2010
    Print publication:
    04 April 2005
  • It was indeed possible for Indians and Europeans to live peacefully in early America and for Indians to survive as distinct communities. Faith and Boundaries uses the story of Martha's Vineyard Wampanoags to examine how. On an island marked by centralized English authority, missionary commitment, and an Indian majority, the Wampanoags' adaptation to English culture, especially Christianity, checked violence while safeguarding their land, community, and ironically, even customs. Yet the colonists' exploitation of Indian land and labor exposed the limits of Christian fellowship and thus hardened racial division. The Wampanoags learned about race through this rising bar of civilization - every time they met demands to reform, colonists moved the bar higher until it rested on biological difference. Under the right circumstances, like those on Martha's Vineyard, religion could bridge wide difference between the peoples of early America, but its transcendent power was limited by the divisiveness of race.

Dispossession by Degrees
  • Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790
  • Jean M. O'Brien
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    28 February 1997
  • According to Jean O'Brien, Indians did not simply disappear from colonial Natick, Massachusetts as the English extended their domination. Rather, the Indians creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. In the late eighteenth century, Natick Indians experienced a process of 'dispossession by degrees' that rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order, and enabled the construction of the myth of Indian extinction.

Crow Dog's Case
  • American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century
  • Sidney L. Harring
  • Published online:
    23 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 January 1994
  • Crow's Dog Case is the first social history of American Indians' role in the making of American law. This book sheds new light on Native American struggles for sovereignty and justice in nineteenth-century America. The 'century of dishonor', a time when American Indians' lands were lost and their tribes reduced to reservations, provoked a wide variety of tribal responses. Some of the more succesful responses were in the area of law, forcing the newly independent American legal order to create a unique place for Indian tribes in American law. Although the United States has a system of law structuring a unique position for American Indians, they have been left out of American legal history. Crow Dog, Crazy Snake, Sitting Bull, Bill Whaley, Tla-coo-yeo-oe, Isparhecher, Lone Wolf, and others had their own jurisprudence, kept alive by their own legal traditions.

A New Order of Things
  • Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816
  • Claudio Saunt
  • Published online:
    25 July 2009
    Print publication:
    28 August 1999
  • The story told here is a critical yet unknown chapter in the creation of the American Republic. Claudio Saunt vividly depicts a dramatic transformation in the eighteenth century that overturned the world of the powerful and numerous Creek Indians and forever changed the Deep South. By 1800, some Creeks, whose most valuable belongings had once been deerskins, owned hundreds of African-American slaves and thousands of cattle. Their leaders, who formerly strove for consensus, now ruled by force. New property fostered a new possessiveness, and government by coercion bred confrontation. A New Order of Things was the first book to chronicle this decisive transformation in America's early history, a transformation that left deep divisions between the wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless.