Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies

Chris Andersen, Jean M. O'Brien, Chris Andersen, Jean M. O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315528830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies is a synthesis of changes and innovations in methodologies in Indigenous Studies, focusing on sources over a broad chronological and geographical range. Written by a group of highly respected Indigenous Studies scholars from across an array of disciplines, this collection offers insight into the methodological approaches contributors take to research, and how these methods have developed in recent years.

The book has a two-part structure that looks, firstly, at the theoretical and disciplinary movement of Indigenous Studies within history, literature, anthropology, and the social sciences. Chapters in this section reveal that, while engaging with other disciplines, Indigenous Studies has forged its own intellectual path by borrowing and innovating from other fields. In part two, the book examines the many different areas with which sources for indigenous history have been engaged, including the importance of family, gender, feminism, and sexuality, as well as various elements of expressive culture such as material culture, literature, and museums. Together, the chapters offer readers an overview of the dynamic state of the field in Indigenous Studies.

This book shines a spotlight on the ways in which scholarship is transforming Indigenous Studies in methodologically innovative and exciting ways, and will be essential reading for students and scholars in the field.

Part I
Emerging from the past

1 Historical sources and methods in Indigenous Studies

Touching on the past, looking to the future

Jean M. O’Brien

Indigenous histories have always existed. Indigenous notions of the past that connect people to places, events, peoples, and memories help Indigenous peoples define their place in the created world and explain its shape, wonders, and human relations (like other kinds of history). Indigenous peoples have their own ways of reckoning and remembering histories, including over the past several decades incorporating historical methodologies associated with western European traditions (Nabokov 2002). Even though Indigenous peoples have always understood their place within the created world according to narratives (many rooted in oral transmission supplemented with other memory technologies, such as winter counts, wampum belts, memory piles, pictographs, and more), Indigenous voices and agency in producing historical narratives have rarely been accorded a place of legitimacy in the formal discipline of history and have instead been dismissed as “myth,” “legend,” “folklore,” or “saga” (Nabokov 2002; Basso 1996).

Philip Deloria periodizes ways of thinking about the history of American Indian history into four broad approaches: (1) Frontier imaginings, characterized by spatial reckonings of encounters that moved from conflict to conquest (beginning in the “contact” era); (2) Racial/developmental hierarchies as a way of accounting for peoples, encounters, and difference (dating from the late eighteenth century); (3) Modernist approaches that focused on the notion of fixed social boundaries between peoples, but also the possibility of their transcendence (beginning in the late nineteenth century); and (4) Postmodern/postcolonial ways of thinking about Indian history, which focus on “the tension between the liberating discussion of boundaries and the constant reshaping of them as political memories of the colonial past” (roughly World War II to the present) (Deloria 2002).

Deloria’s synthesis is remarkable in what it captures, including the easily overlooked fact that certain traces (or even larger elements) of each of these approaches continue to shape narratives about Indigenous peoples. Monographs continue to promote a narrative arc of an epic clash between Euro-American and Indigenous foes, which ends in the defeat of the admirable Indigenous nations, their struggles ultimately futile as they inevitably fade into insignificance, with no acknowledgment of the continuation of their political existence. The historical literature continues its fixation on “mixed bloods” as somehow racially and culturally “deficient” compared to their supposedly “pure” forebears, frequently purporting to “measure” the degree of “assimilation.” In these formulations, “racial” change via “mixing” with other races (via discredited nineteenth-century notions of racial science predicated on “pure,” distinct races) or cultural change supposedly diminishes the indigeneity of the person/peoples, and greases the slide into “assimilation.” These deeply held and often unconscious assumptions presume that Indigenous peoples can only be the victims of change, never its agents. Indigenous peoples, then, can never be a part of modernity, but instead stand in as modernity’s polar opposite, thus robbing them of the possibility of being historical actors and peoples (O’Brien 2010).

Part of the problem for proponents of Indigenous history is that the discipline of history is deeply wedded to national narratives as the infrastructure that channels analysis and interpretation in particular directions to the exclusion of others. The logical outcome is the rise and triumph of the nation-state in the face of internal and external foes. In the case of the United States and its Indigenous peoples, the standard plot line follows the long history of Indigenous displacement (often figured as “territorial expansion” or “territorial acquisition”) that secures the land base of the nation, a process that in Indigenous Studies is understood as “settler colonialism.” In Patrick Wolfe’s classic formulation, “settler colonialism is an inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating indigenous societies” (Wolfe 2006).

A standard means of framing the United States as a nation might begin with “pre-contact” Native North America, then proceed through “exploration,” “discovery,” the claiming of Indigenous lands for European nations, and the contest among European nations for mastery of the hemisphere. As Michael Witgen has shown, claims to imperial mastery of Indigenous peoples existed in their own fantasies rather than in actual power relations throughout the upper Great Lakes region into the nineteenth century, depending on where in Native North America you stood (Witgen 2007, 2012). In Latin America, Patricia Seed has demonstrated convincingly the degree to which Spaniards engaged in mere “ceremonies of possession” rather than claims to conquest that could be plausibly defended (Seed 1995). In the case of the United States, a long period of “colonial” history follows these claims of possession (however illusory), with the American Revolution rendered as the “post-colonial” moment of the nation (meaning shedding the shackles of English colonialism for the free development of a democratic republic, the United States). After the American Revolution, the nation fends off internal and external threats to become the world power. With these framings, the outcome is predetermined (the triumph of the nation), and plot lines lead to “declension narratives” for Indigenous peoples. Many make the leap from “declension” to the “extinction” of Indigenous peoples.

The fundamental problem in national narratives of the United States is that they cannot possibly account for the existence of more than 560 federally recognized tribal nations engaged in continuing nation-to-nation relationships with the US federal government, and they cannot adequately represent even a fraction of Indigenous historical and contemporary experiences (which include far more complexity than even the basic fact of federally recognized tribal nations standing in diplomatic relationships to the United States, including state-recognized tribes as well as tribal peoples unrecognized by any external political body) (Wilkins and Stark 2011). Accounts that fail to acknowledge the political dimension of Indigenous nationhood typically elect to reckon Indigenous people as racial or ethnic minorities, which cannot capture the unique status of First Peoples in the United States (and elsewhere). Too often, narratives about Indigenous peoples founder when they train their focus too tightly on Indigenous “culture(s)” without probing, for example, the power and prerogative Indigenous nations possess to defend their cultural practices on the political and legal level. Framing Indigenous histories within the rubric of “multiculturalism” distorts their place within the settler colonial state. Indigenous Studies cannot settle for the idea that Indigenous peoples have culture in the absence of politics.

Published accounts produced by non-Indigenous people until well into the twentieth century followed two basic trajectories. The first was that which plotted the Wars for the West, the military history that eventually dispossessed Indigenous peoples in the service of casting the United States as a national power. The second concerned the proto-ethnology and then anthropology emerging largely from the mid-nineteenth century onward that purported to create a science of man, including Indigenous North Americans, as part of a racial hierarchy and then as a culturally distinct mosaic of peoples whose ways of life faced constant threats in the face of modernity; this was figured as “salvage anthropology”, aimed at producing snapshots of cultures in supposed eclipse.

The tide seemed to turn for Indigenous history at the very end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. No book can claim the massive influence in the United States of Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which boldly called out mainstream America for its treatment of Indian people and Indian history, and signalled a dramatically new direction that many of us trace as the touchstone for the development of Indigenous Studies as a field. This book appeared amidst the Red Power movement, and the emergence of “ethnic studies” units and programs, as well as departments of American Indian Studies. Robert Berkhofer’s 1971 call for a New Indian history looked to interdisciplinarity (especially between history and anthropology, or the emergent approach of ethnohistory) to write dynamic Indian histories that imagined Indians as part of the national “present,” and took Indians seriously as political actors (Berkhofer 1971). Over time, the “New Indian History” took on the notion of placing Indians themselves at the centre of historical analyses.

Indigenous history methodologies

At one time, many mainstream historians regarded Indigenous history as marginal on the basis that rich and thorough archives were sparse or non-existent: What to do in the absence of “real archives” or “reliable documentation” as typically figured by the discipline? How does one confront the demands of the discipline of history regarding particular kinds of written documentation, and the continued marginalization of particular kinds of sources – oral histories, for example? Who gets to decide what history matters, and what counts as reliable evidence? How does one narrate histories in the absence of documents historians routinely demand? What makes the sources of Indigenous history different (and what doesn’t make them different)? What kinds of sources do exist that are core to the discipline, as traditionally composed? These are crucial questions for the field, and areas of robust critical engagement for scholars of Indigenous history.

In fact, as recent scholarship has amply demonstrated, Indigenous peoples have been producing written documentation of and about their lives for hundreds of years, even if the standard is writing in European languages (let alone the ancient writing technologies in rich evidence across the Americas that pre-date the presence of Europeans in this hemisphere) (see for example Deloria 2002; Jaskoski 1996; O’Connell 1992; Warrior 2005; Round 2010). Beginning with the first Native scholars in the Indian College at Harvard in the 1660s, Indigenous peoples have been writing and publishing at an accelerating rate into the present (Deloria 2002).

The long-standing marginality of the field has produced a situation of rich possibilities for transforming Indigenous histories, and, if there is the will, national narratives as well. An active embrace of the many and diverse archives of Indigenous history, and openness to the methodologies of Indigenous approaches that have been marginalized or disdained, promise the transformation of the field in fruitful directions (as outlined in this volume). From the perspective of Indigenous histories, a couple of overarching notions are vital to bear in mind: First, there is an abundance of documentation to support the pursuit of Indigenous history. No longer can it be claimed that the sources just don’t exist to do justice to that history. There are also “unexpected” archives that have been underutilized and unappreciated, many of them stemming directly from the relationship of tribal peoples within settler colonialism. And second, these archives – those longer known and those now being uncovered – must be appreciated from Indigenous perspectives, which have overturned older understandings in countless instances.

Indigenous Studies, Indigenous history, and, increasingly, a move toward global approaches to Indigenous Studies and Indigenous history subsume an expansive embrace of different perspectives on historical actors and events, imaginative approaches to identifying and using source materials, creativity in developing rigorous analytical frames that can transform Indigenous histories and their interventions, and an almost seamless interdisciplinarity that seeks to illuminate historical experiences that have been kept on the margins. Indigenous Studies as currently practised draws on many scholarly traditions, but no one volume captures the preoccupations, ethics, and fundamentally distinct research methodologies better than Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s path-breaking book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999). Indigenous Studies requires the acknowledgment of two fundamental commitments in order to gain legitimacy in the view of other practitioners and of the peoples, communities, and/or nations involved: an acknowledgment of the positionality of the researcher/writer in relation to the peoples, communities, and/or nations involved, and an acknowledgment of the accountability of the research/writer in relation to the peoples, communities, and/or nations. Smith’s eloquent study contains a wealth of insights stemming from these ethics and a thorough genealogy of the problem of Western knowledge systems for Indigenous peoples. Indigenous Studies pertains to living, breathing peoples, and what is written carries real consequences for the subjects of the research/writing. These relationships read very differently from the notion of “objectivity” formerly elevated to such heights in the discipline but now understood by most to be a problematic notion at best (Novick 1988).

In the space remaining, I’d like to take account of some of the possible “archives” for Indigenous history (by no means exhaustive), and some of the methodologies already in use in fruitful and promising ways in Indigenous Studies and Indigenous histories.

First and foremost, the obsession (in the case of the United States) of English colonialism with the legalities of land ownership (broadly including the resources on and underneath the land), inherited by the United States, has resulted in the production of massive, complex archives. These archives are far from perfect, and settler colonial claims to “proper” transfer of Indigenous homelands to the colonial state by no means followed the espoused protocols whereby the United States claimed the mantra of “expansion with honour” toward Indigenous peoples. Still, the stated imperative to follow protocols regarding landownership resulted in the accumulation of rich materials for Indigenous history.

The “New Social History” that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s embraced interdisciplinarity as an approach, including quantitative methods. Indigenous Studies has been somewhat slower to take up this approa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction – Indigenous Studies: An appeal for methodological promiscuity
• Part I Emerging from the past
• Part II Alternative sources and methodological reorientations
• Index