After the Handbook: A Perspective on 40 years of Scholarship Since the Publication of the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, Northeast

Introduction

The Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, Northeast, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1978, will soon celebrate its 40-year anniversary. Long the source of information—the baseline—on the history and cultures of the Native peoples of northeastern North America, it is perhaps time to reflect on and bring up-to-date the contributions made in history and ethnohistory, ethnology, and archaeology over the past four decades.

The aim of Northeast, as stated by volume editor Bruce G. Trigger, was “to describe the history, cultural background, and present circumstances of the Indian peoples of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada.” Given the lack of regional ethnographies and that the concept of culture areas had fallen into disfavor, it was decided to present accounts of the indigenous peoples—”tribes”—resident in the broad area defined ecologically and by subsistence economies south of the boreal forest of Canada; north of the lower Ohio watershed, the Cumberland River, and Virginia; and west from the Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes. For the purposes of the volume, the Northeast was organized into three geographic divisions: Coastal, St. Lawrence Lowlands, and Great Lakes-Riverine. Included here were speakers of all the recognized Eastern Algonquian and Northern Iroquoian languages, Central Algonquian speakers of the upper Great Lakes, and Siouan speakers just west of Lake Michigan.¹

The archaeological record or “prehistory” of the Northeast was summarized in four chapters spanning the period from the immediate post-Pleistocene to 1000 CE. Following these were essays describing the archaeological cultures of each of the three geographic divisions just mentioned, which after 1000 CE were assumed to correspond with historically known groups as identified generally by the direct historical approach. Trigger acknowledged that although the outline of culture history presented would likely remain accurate in general terms, detailed subject-specific accounts would soon be out-of-date.

The languages spoken by Native peoples were surveyed in three chapters, again corresponding to the three geographic divisions of the Northeast. Addressed was historical information on individual languages, language features, phonetic changes, dialects, and inter-language contacts. It is important to note that the comprehensive Languages, Volume 17 of the Handbook, was designed to be the basic reference work on the American Indian languages north of Middle America, and as such addresses in detail language characteristics and uses, historical relationships, and the history of language research.²

The bulk of Northeast consists of combined ethnographic and ethnohistorical narratives on more than forty named groups, each with an appended synonymy. Added to these were descriptions of several “cultural regions” including the Ohio Valley, Virginia Algonquians, and southern New England and Long Island, where it was difficult to recognize discrete ethnic entities or there existed confusion in the identification of individual groups by early observers. Separate chapters were written on the history of research in the region, seventeenth-century wars, early European contacts, cultural unity and diversity, and others. Throughout, the ethnographic present and post-contact histories and culture change form central, unifying themes.

The information presented in the narratives is, in nearly all cases, derived from the familiar historical and theoretical perspectives of the late nineteenth to the last quarter of the twentieth century and informed by descriptive accounts written by arriving European colonists. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, interests in American Indian life had turned to origins, investigated through the application of archaeology and history, and then to the newly established discipline of anthropology. The first scientific research on Indian societies of the Northeast, begun in the mid-nineteenth century, was structured around evolutionism and the comparative method, primarily that envisioned by Lewis Henry Morgan. By the turn of the century evolution as an explanatory and organizational concept, along with the comparative method, was being challenged and then, in considerable part, rejected by Boasian anthropology. Nonetheless further, focused, and more extensive inquiries into linguistics, sociopolitical organization, kinship, the influence of geography and environment, archaeology, biological anthropology, and chronology followed, reflecting an...