Indigenous History and Imperial America: American Indian History Today and Tomorrow

Scholars of American Indian history are transforming what historians thought they knew about North America's pasts. Indeed, the shift towards what Frederick E. Hoxie, editor of the recent Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, refers to as Indigenous History—onward from the New Indian History of the past decades—is afoot, and it brings with it considerable consequences for historians of Indian Country and, more broadly, North America (p. 10). As the authors included in the Handbook demonstrate, recent efforts to marry indigenous and North America's history with the framework of settler colonialism raise important questions as well as offer new directions. Indeed, one of the primary goals of such efforts is to break down old assumptions regarding the continent's past and to link Native peoples' experiences with those of other settler nations around the world. Scholars embracing this framework argue that, far from exceptional, the United States was and is one among many colonial powers of the earth. As they reap the rewards of the New Indian History, the Handbook authors champion this paradigm shift and a broader move towards an indigenist approach. Most excitingly, the authors also leave the door open for much additional work.

The geographic scope, interdisciplinary approaches included, and bibliographies alone make The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History a valuable contribution to the field. The text offers three sections containing complementary essays, with each section examining the field from different perspectives. The first section is arranged temporally, and it endeavors to narrate American Indian history from earliest times—with Cameron B. Wesson's overview of archaeological theories and findings—to the present. The second proceeds regionally, with an aim to examine topics in American Indian history via particular peoples and places such as Iroquoia, Alaska, and Oklahoma. Though the section largely adheres to the bounds of the current U.S. nation-state, the vast array of peoples and polities considered is nonetheless admirable. The final section offers a series of essays arranged thematically and tackles topics such as gender and sexuality, as well as urban, intellectual, and economic history. The intention behind the organization seems to be that it offers three compelling strategies for investigating problems in Native American history. While Frederick Hoxie's introduction is an excellent essay in and of itself, more could have been done to discuss the contributions of each section, perhaps in a concluding essay that ties together the entire anthology at the close. One of the exciting aspects of the format, however, is that it encourages the reader to engage deeply with the field and to think thoroughly about what each section adds to the discussion. Equally exciting is that, if taken together, the Handbook's three sections offer a view of the field that is simultaneously top-down and bottom-up, macrohistorical as well as microhistorical. While a concluding essay may have added to the collection, the Handbook's last piece on global history by Michael Witgen, does, in many ways, offer a fitting capstone to a work whose central goals are to point the way forward for the field and explicitly link Native American histories with those of indigenous peoples worldwide.

Since it is impossible to do justice to all of the essays included, I will instead discuss only a sampling. Overall, one of the major strengths of the Handbook is that, far from simply offering a current state of the field—which it does well—the authors offer a roadmap for future scholarship by demonstrating that there remain many unanswered questions. Indeed, one of the most exciting essays in the collection comes from Coll Thrush. Thrush lays out a compelling vision for the future of urban Native histories, and he marries indigenous histories with broader perspectives by highlighting Native Americans' roles in global urbanization. Though many in the academy and broader public divorce American Indian peoples from urban settings, Thrush makes clear that, of course, such a dissociation obscures...