The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History ed. by Frederick E. Hoxie (review)

As The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History makes clear, American Indian history has blossomed into a mature field of historical inquiry. Gone are the days when Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis subsumed North America's indigenous peoples within a westward-moving narrative where heroic settlers triumphed over "static and backward" Indians (p. 2). Until the dawn of the New Indian History of the late 1960s, as editor Frederick E. Hoxie points out, scholars drew on Turner to interpret Indians as "primitive" and Europeans as "cultured" (p. 2). Yet the civil rights movement, the advent of social history, and Indian activists and intellectuals birthed American Indian history and studies, fields that elevate Indians as "dynamic actors" who have adapted, accommodated, and resisted European colonization since 1492 (p. 5).

This volume captures the chronologies, geographies, and themes of the field. Divided into three parts, the volume presents eight contributions covering the "Major Chapters in the Native American Past" from 1492 to the twenty-first century, eleven chapters on "Regional and Tribal Histories," and another eleven on "Big Themes." Each author marshals publications that debuted in the late 1980s or early 1990s when questions first posed in the 1970s began receiving sustained scholarly attention. Hoxie offers the overarching argument that American Indian history is "Indigenous History," anchoring indigenous people in the American historical narrative (p. 10). The collection reflects a coalition of Native and non-Native scholars: at least nine of the thirty-two total authors hail from such sovereign polities as the Round Valley Indian reservation and the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation.

Part 1 canvasses scholarly trends in specific periods and stresses the endurance, complexity, and resilience of American Indians since first contact with Europeans. New diseases, new trade goods, and new patterns of warfare prompted Indians to adapt as best as they could. Some, like the Osages and Comanches, manipulated access to firearms, horses, and other technologies to expand their influence. On the Pacific coast, according to Claudio Saunt, Russian and Spanish colonization exercised a "calamitous impact" on Native populations who, nonetheless, incorporated Spanish Catholicism into preexisting spiritual customs (p. 80). As the United States consolidated its hold over the continent in the twentieth century, an extremely diverse population of Native Americans blended "Indian and American thinking and practices," laying the foundation for a post-1960 "Indian Renaissance" in politics, law, language, and the arts (pp. 112, 129). Even today, according to Wisconsin Oneida Paul DeMain, Indians face the future by "reaching backward" for strength in traditions (p. 165).

Part 2 historicizes specific regions up to the present day. Many chapters probe those areas that have received little attention, such as the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Great Basin, while also covering familiar ground in chapters on the Southeast, the Great Lakes, and Iroquoia. Some chapters interrogate key themes, such as relationship building in the Great Lakes or the geographic and cultural "world of movement" of the Indian Southwest (p. 217). Andrew H. Fisher combats stereotypes of the vanishing Indian personified by Chief Joseph and Chief Seattle by focusing on how the Northwest Indians adapted their cultures, identities, and lands to colonial pressures. Still other scholars write compelling narratives of continuity and adaptation in places like Native California, Native Alaska, and the Native South. Furthermore, more and more work charts the built environment. In the Great Basin and Great Plains, Indians adapted their economies, polities, and traditions to arid landscapes and the wild fluctuations in weather patterns.

Finally, Part 3 unpacks eleven major themes in American Indian history, ranging from treaty making and intellectual history to the expressive arts and Indians in popular culture. Many essays embrace an interdisciplinary approach and provide a model for interdisciplinary collaboration. Red Lake Ojibwe Brenda J. Child's essay on gender and family highlights both men and women in their struggle to work and survive in twentieth-century Ojibwe country. Other Native...