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  • A Nation or a People?
  • Roger L. Nichols (bio)
Frederick E. Hoxie. Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805–1935. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 395 pp. Tables, maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

In a review written more than fifteen years ago, James A. Clifton called histories of individual Indian tribes “an obsolete paradigm.” He suggested that this particular variety of ethnohistorical scholarship lacked any intellectual justification. According to his critique, such studies avoided any debate over method or the scholarly limits that the format presented. Even worse, he continued, such books usually failed to consider the frameworks presented by other scholars. He saw little effort being expended to employ, compare, or contrast data concerning one tribe with existing studies of others. Rather, in his view, each author worked to fill minor voids or cracks in the historical edifice of the Native American experience. His final criticism of this genre was that most of its practitioners lacked any significant knowledge of either the language or the culture of their subjects. 1

All of these criticisms have at least some basis in fact. Yet American ethnohistorians continue to write tribal histories. Frederick Hoxie, the author of Parading Through History, has a broad knowledge of Indian affairs and scholarship. He directed the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library for some years, and presently serves as the vice president for research and education at that institution. Having written previously on the major issues in Indian history during the 1880–1920 era, he brings his considerable knowledge and historical skills to the Crow story as he traces their encounters with other peoples between 1805 and 1935.

Recognizing that criticisms of the sort Clifton raised have a real validity, the author deals with several of the issues head on. Because few tribal materials have survived, he discusses the question of what sorts of insights can be drawn from the existing records, given that they represent mostly bureaucratic paper compiled by outsiders who knew little about the internal workings of tribal society, and often cared little about what they recorded. He suggests that the actions of tribal and band leaders, as well as what the agents [End Page 407] recorded as having been said can open the door to an understanding of what the Crow thought about their circumstances and how they worked to direct their changing experiences for their own culturally based objectives. In striving to do this he has succeeded to a surprising degree.

While tracing the historical experiences of this people the author places their history within the broad context of Indian-Indian and Indian-American contact, competition, and conflict. Clearly all of these played fundamental roles in the Crow story. His overall thesis is broad and he presents it clearly. For the Crow the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought a variety of new experiences. Physical displacement by the aggressive Lakota Sioux bands moving across the northern plains forced them to move and to restructure their economy and subsistence patterns. The impact of disease and political domination by the expanding United States added to their difficulties. In responding to these pressures the Crow changed their economic practices, leadership, and location frequently. Hoxie presents these changes as the pragmatic efforts of this people to retain their customs and identity. In fact, he posits that amid these new developments the Crow society used the changes to forge a modern Indian community—a nation.

To make his case the author divides the narrative into three eras. The first lasted from 1805 until the 1880s. During that time the book traces Crow migrations, their relations with neighboring groups of competing Native Americans, and their increasing contacts with Anglo-Americans who moved out onto the plains. The Crow story takes on elements common to many Indian peoples at the time. Before his 1805 starting point Hoxie depicts them as having moved west from present North Dakota to the Yellowstone River area in Montana. There particular bands developed that continued as identifiable elements for generations. Keenly aware of the need for an ethnological basis for his analysis, the author examines band...

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