Jean M. O'Brien

Susan Sleeper-Smith

Juliana Barr

Nancy Shoemaker

Why You Can't Teach United States History Without American Indians

The Contingency of Race

Native American Whalemen and the World

A resource for all who teach and study history, this book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past. The uniqueness of Indigenous history, as interwoven more fully in the American story, will challenge students to think in new ways about larger themes in U.S. history, such as settlement and colonization, economic and political power, citizenship and movements for equality, and the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. Contributors are Chris Andersen, Juliana Barr, David R. M. Beck, Jacob Betz, Paul T. Conrad, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Margaret D. Jacobs, Adam Jortner, Rosalyn R. LaPier, John J. Laukaitis, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Robert J. Miller, Mindy J. Morgan, Andrew Needham, Jean M. O'Brien, Jeffrey Ostler, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, James D. Rice, Phillip H. Round, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Scott Manning Stevens.

Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians

When American Indians and Europeans met on the frontiers of 18th-century eastern North America, they had many shared ideas about human nature, political life, and social relations. This title is about how they came to see themselves as people so different in their customs and natures that they appeared to be each other's opposite.

Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-century North America

A Strange Likeness

The histories told about American Indian and European encounters on the frontiers of North America are usually about cultural conflict. This book takes a different tack by looking at how much Indians and Europeans had in common. In six chapters, this book compares Indian and European ideas about land, government, recordkeeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body. Focusing on eastern North America in the 18th century, up through the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, each chapter discusses how Indians and Europeans shared some core beliefs and practices. Paradoxically, the more American Indians and Europeans came to know each other, the more they came to see each other as different, so different indeed that they appeared to be each other's opposite. European colonists thought Indians a primitive people, laudable perhaps for their simplicity but not destined to possess and rule over North America. Simultaneously, Indians came to view Europeans as their antithesis, equally despicable for their insatiable greed and love of money. Thus, even though American Indians and Europeans started the 18th century with ideas in common, they ended the century convinced of their intractable differences. The 18th century was a crucial moment in American history, as British colonists and their Anglo-American successors rapidly pushed westward, sometimes making peace and sometimes making war with the powerful Indian nations-the Iroquois and Creek confederacies, Cherokee nation, and other Native peoples-standing between them and the west. But the 18th century also left an important legacy in the world of ideas, as Indians and Europeans abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity so as to instead develop new ideas rooted in the conviction that, by custom and perhaps even by nature, Native Americans and Europeans were peoples fundamentally at odds.

Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America

Although the general public is not widely aware of this trend, the American Indian population has grown phenomenally since 1900, their demographic nadir. No longer a "vanishing" race, Indians have rebounded to 1492 population estimates in nine decades. Until now, most research has focused on catastrophic population decline, but Nancy Shoemaker studies how and why American Indians have recovered. Her analysis of the social, cultural, and economic implications of the family and demographic patterns fueling the recovery compares five different Indian groups: the Seneca Nation in New York State, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Red Lake Ojibways in Minnesota, Yakamas in Washington State, and Navajos in the Southwest. Marshaling individual-level census data, Shoemaker places American Indians in a broad social and cultural context and compares their demographic patterns to those of Euroamericans and African Americans in the United States.

American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race

Full of colorful details and engrossing stories, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles shows that the aspirations of individual Americans to be recognized as people worthy of others' respect was a driving force in the global extension of United States influence shortly after the nation's founding. Nancy Shoemaker contends that what she calls extraterritorial Americans constituted the vanguard of a vast, early US global expansion. Using as her site of historical investigation nineteenth-century Fiji, the "cannibal isles" of American popular culture, she uncovers stories of Americans looking for opportunities to rise in social status and enhance their sense of self. Prior to British colonization in 1874, extraterritorial Americans had, she argues, as much impact on Fiji as did the British. While the American economy invested in the extraction of sandalwood and sea slugs as resources to sell in China, individuals who went to Fiji had more complicated, personal objectives. Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles considers these motivations through the lives of the three Americans who left the deepest imprint on Fiji: a runaway whaleman who settled in the islands, a sea captain's wife, and a merchant. Shoemaker's book shows how ordinary Americans living or working overseas found unusual venues where they could show themselves worthy of others' respect—others' approval, admiration, or deference.

Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles

Clearing a Path offers new models and ideas for exploring Native American history, drawing from disciplines like history, anthropology, and creative writing making this a must-read for anyone interested in the history of indigenous peoples.

Nancy Shoemaker

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