"Thinking Like an Indian": Exploring American Indian Views of American History

In a recent collection of essays by Native American academics, historian Donald Fixico declared that "obtaining a tribal viewpoint, a Native feeling, and the other side of history, and then thinking like an Indian and putting yourself in that other position, is mandatory for teaching and writing a balanced history of Indian-white relations." ¹ No modern scholar would argue with that statement. As Fixico himself acknowledged elsewhere in his essay, the call for a "tribal viewpoint" has been a central concern of American historians writing about Native Americans at least since Wilcomb Washburn's 1957 call for a "moral history of Indian-white relations." ²

Fixico would also find a sympathetic audience among historians who work in other aspects of the national past. "Putting yourself in that other position"--imagining the object of history as its subject--has preoccupied historians of immigrants, women, African-Americans, and working people for at least as long as it has engaged the attention of American Indian scholars. But as a Native American scholar, Fixico states the case with special poignancy. For him--and for many other historians from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds--the academic effort to re-cast American history from the perspective of marginalized actors has fallen short.

Fixico's invitation to adopt a tribal perspective and "think like an Indian" is not new--or unique--but its meaning is not self-evident. How exactly is one to "think like an Indian?" Do Indians "think" about history in a uniform way? And if so, does that "thinking" determine a "tribal viewpoint?" Is there an "Indian" viewpoint regarding American history? If so, how do we identify it?

Anthropologists and literary scholars have often argued that despite the diversity of native cultures in North America, the values on which those traditional lifeways have rested frequently overlap. That position is most persuasive for the precontact communities that flourished across the continent prior to 1492. ³ Moving into the era of European expansion and native resistance--centuries of disease, warfare, displacement, migration, and dramatic cultural transformation--the argument for a single native viewpoint is more difficult to sustain. Here is where describing the process of "thinking like an Indian" becomes difficult. It would seem difficult to define a single "tribal perspective" on the complex events of the past 500 years. What then does Fixico's plea mean for those who attempt to respond to the mandate that they "think like an Indian" when writing history?

What follows here are some tentative answers to this question. Responding to Fixico's call is difficult, but we occupy a moment when unraveling what it means to "think like an Indian" is a crucial undertaking. The task is both compelling and threatening. Compelling because it challenges our fundamental belief that the historical imagination can encompass the experiences of all peoples. Threatening because it exposes historians who make the attempt to attack from all sides of the professional battlefield. Academic traditionalists concerned about affirmative action in the academy and the proliferation of what they perceive as self-serving "studies" programs charge that there are no "perspectives" in "real' history, just facts. And, they might add, Indians "think" like everyone else. From another quarter come advocates of a nationalist scholarship who reject attempts by outsiders to understand their point of view or who retreat to a separate academic universe that argues for a Native American history (or Asian American or other similar particular histories) that is unique and therefore unrelated to other aspects of the national experience. They might argue that Indians "think" like no one else. Thinking historically about "thinking like an Indian" might provide a pathway through these difficult issues.

At first glance, defining how Native Americans "think" about history, particularly American history, would appear to be an exercise in the obvious. American Indians have been systematically dispossessed and demeaned for five centuries. Throughout this period native...