History 332

Native American Communities:  Tribes and tribal territories

  • James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (1989)

Further readings (sources, methodology, and interpretation):

  • Jacques Ferland, “Tribal Dissent or White Aggression? Interpreting Penobscot Indian Dispossession Between 1808 and 1835,” Maine History 43.2 (2007), 125-170.  e-Reserve
  • Pauleena MacDougall, “The Historian’s Dilemma: Choosing, Weighing, and Interpreting Sources,” Maine History 43.2 (2007), 171-186.  e-Reserve

Questions:

  • From previous studies in Native American history that you have read, what was familiar to you about Merrell’s narrative and analysis of the history of the Catawbas and their neighbors?  What was new?  What intrigued you?  What didn’t?
  • How does this book add to our previous conversations about “community” in America?
  • Piedmont peoples, villages and clusters of settlements, societies, Catawba communities, Catawba Nation: throughout his monograph, Merrell uses a variety of collective terms to describe the Native American peoples living north and west of Charleston, S.C.
    How do those terms encourage us to rethink some of our assumptions about “community” that are based on English and European settlement patterns and land use?  What constituted “community” for the Catawba? Over time, what changed and what did they seek to preserve?
    How does Merrell describe the process by which the “Catawba Nation” emerged?  What does he argue about the significance of that process, from the vantage points of the Catawba and the Anglo-American communities?
  • Merrell sets up his study by describing “several overlapping stages of invasions” that shaped the Catawba’s “new world” (microbes, traders, and settlers).  Why does he characterize these as “invasions”?  At the same time, he also indicates ways in which the initial presence and continued influence of Native American “communities” shaped the “new societies”—the new world—that Anglo- and Euro-Americans established.
    What does his discussion and analysis of the interactions of Native Americans and Europeans on the south Atlantic “cultural frontier” suggest about intentional and unintentional causes and consequences, and about agency (the ability to influence outcomes)?  How did intentions, causality, and agency change over time?
  • Quoting Robert Berkhofer, Merrell describes the post-contact history of these piedmont peoples in part as “multiple declines and renaissances”—a series of difficult changes and responses— where “each intrusion threatened old ways and forced Indians to rearrange their lives according to new imperatives.”
    How does Merrell date the “stages of invasions” and the cycles of decline and renaissance or disruption and reformation?  What does he highlight about each of the encounters and about the Catawba’s responses to those encounters?
    How does the periodization that Merrell describes and suggests fit into the stages of Anglo-European settlement?  Does Merrell’s characterization of these processes encourage or force us to rethink the familiar and more traditional periodization of the colonial era and the early republic?
  • Merrell emphasizes the strategies by which the Catawba blended “old and new ways that would permit them to survive in the present and prepare for the future.”  The old and new ways that he described were, both separately and in combination, economic, political, social, religious, and cultural.
    Why did the Catawba choose “cooperation and survival” rather than “resistance and ruin”? 

    What aspects of their life and subsistence did they have to alter at each stage?  What were they able to maintain? Did their responses change over time?
    Is it possible to determine which of the “ancient” ways mattered most to the Catawba? Is it necessary?
  • In his history of the Penobscot between 1808 and 1835, Ferland recounts and analyzes the process by which the tribe was dispossessed of substantial tribal lands and the tribal leadership became bitterly divided.  He prefaces that history with a critique of nineteenth and early twentieth century accounts and histories by Anglo-Americans and of what he describes as the continued uncritical use of those earlier sources.
    What are his primary objections to the accounts written by Fannie H. Echstorm and William D. Williamson?  According to Ferland, how have their accounts continued to influence the historiography and history of the Penobscot?
    What does his revision of that history emphasize?  What sources did he use?  What does he hope to accomplish in this new version of Penobscot history?
  • Pauleena MacDougall offers a nuanced challenge to Ferland’s “provocative” essay, supporting some of his assessments about the early Anglo-American writers of Penobscot history and critiquing other claims that he makes.
    What reconsideration of Eckstorm’s accounts does MacDougall emphasize?  How does she recommend that we read Eckstorm’s early folklorist perspective, evidence, and argument?
    In contrast to Ferland, what does she recommend about combining folklore and history in order to recapture Native American history?  What counter argument does she offer about the nature of the Penobscot tribal schism?  What cautions does she offer about the inclusion and exclusion of sources in Native American history?


More further readings:

  • Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1970)
  • David J. Silverman, "‘We chuse to be bounded': Native American Animal Husbandry in Colonial New England," William and Mary Quarterly 60.3 (2003), 511-548.  History Cooperative
  • James Axtell, "Ethnohistory:  An Historian's Viewpoint," in Axtell, The European and the Indian:  Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, (1981), 3-15.  e-Reserve
  • Alfonso Ortiz, "Indian-White Relations:  A View from the Other Side of the ‘Frontier'," in Frederick E. Hoxie, Indians in American History:  An Introduction (1988), 1-16.  e-Reserve
  • Nancy Shoemaker, "The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women," Journal of Women's History 2.3 (1991), 39-57.  e-Reserve

Questions for the further readings:

  • How does Wallace organize his study—and why?  What theoretical framework shapes his account, and how does that determine the conclusions he draws?
  • How does he characterize the social and political organization of the Seneca?  How does he incorporate a discussion of culture and beliefs into his discussion of community?  What does community or village mean in the context of the Seneca?
  • How did the Seneca initially come into contact with Europeans?  How did conflict develop?  Was the outcome inevitable?
  • What happened to the Seneca community once their interaction became political as well as economic?
  • What model of community is a reservation?
  • How did the Seneca under Handsome Lake attempt to reconcile the conflicts between the Old Ways and Euro-American ways?  What kind of reconciliation was possible?