Week 14: The Road to Self Determination

This week we will conclude our exploration of Native American history with a discussion about self-determination and contemporary reservation life.

Points of Entry:

Self-Determination:
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2010/12/report-questions-congressional-commitment-to-self-determination/

Sherman Alexie:
http://www.fallsapart.com/biography.html

Indian Gaming:
http://www.indiangaming.com/home/

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  What are some of the arguments? How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?


What are your final thoughts for the class?  

Week 13: The Indian New Deal and Termination

The Indian New Deal (1920s -196)

This week we'll explore the ways that new political and legal identities shaped Indian country and its interactions with state and federal governments.  We will discuss the Indian Reorganization Act, World War II, and the termination period.

Indian Reorganization Act

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=483

Navajo Code Talkers

http://www.navajocodetalkers.org/

Ira Hayes 

http://www.jango.com/music/Johnny+Cash?l=0

Termination Act

http://www.smokersinfo.net/seneca-cigarette-tax-bill-is-a-throwback-to-‘termination-era’/

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  What are some of the arguments? How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Week 12: The Nadir in Indian Country

This week we will explore the "post-frontier" years in Indian Country.  As we'll see, this period was both one of great tragedy but also one of filled with the seeds of hope and change within Native America.

Points of Entry:

The Dawes Act

http://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/native09.htm

Indian Boarding Schools

http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/a_f/erdrich/boarding/gallery.htm

American Indians and the Great War

http://www.army.mil/americanindians/soldiershonored/a_codetalkers.html

Indian Citizenship

http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/stories/0701_0146.html

Questions for Discussion:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  

What are some of the arguments?

How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

The Dawes Act dramatically reduced Native land holdings over the course of 30 years.  Would Native America be different if the Act wasn't passed?

Similarly, if Indian boarding schools didn't exist, how would Native America look today?

Week 11: Indian Resistance and the Closing of the Frontier

This week will look at the disastrous consequences of the clashes between American settlers and Indian country in the decades after the Civil War through the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Points of Entry:

Geronimo website:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/the_films/episode_4_trailer

Wounded Knee:

http://www.woundedkneemuseum.org/index.htm

Questions:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  

What are some of the arguments?

How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Why were almost all encounters after 1865 so violent?  Was this the only inevitable outcome?

Week 9: Antebellum Borderlands and Indian Country

This week we will look at how indigenous borderlands became bordered lands during the early 19th century.  We will spend a great deal of time looking at Natives west of the Mississippi dealt with an American invasion.  Finally, we will also discuss the role of art, cartography, and "manifest destiny" in shaping of the  "frontier" and American identity.

Points of Entry:

Comancheria Map:

http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Apr10/Hamalainen/index.html

Juan Buatista de Anza Trail:

http://www.nps.gov/juba/index.htm

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  

What are some of the arguments?

How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Additional question for discussion:

We've extensively discussed the ways that non-Natives have defined the commemoration and teaching of American Indian history.  How do you think cartography and map making also shape our understanding of Native history?  

Week 8: "Domestic, Dependent Nations"

This week will explore the relationship between Indian country and the early American republic.  Topics include Lewis and Clark, Andrew Jackson, Indian removals, and the Trail of Tears.

Points of Entry:

Lewis and Clark Expedition and Early Expansion:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lewisandclark/lewisandclark.html

http://www.trailtribes.org/

http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/

http://publications.newberry.org/frontiertoheartland/

Trail of Tears National Historic Trail:

http://www.nps.gov/trte/

Thoughts/Questions for blog discussion:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  
What are some of the arguments?

How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Week 7: Global Wars and Indian Resistance (1756-1815)

This week explores the foundational conflicts that would ultimately lead to the formation of the United States of America from the perspective of Indian country.  We will particularly investigate pan-Indian confederacies like Pontiac's and Tecumseh's Rebellions.

Points of Entry

Pontiac's War:

http://www.forttours.com/pages/pontiac.asp

Tecumseh's Wars:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/printable/section.asp?id=3

http://rediscover1812.com/?p=169

Thoughts/Questions for blog discussion:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  

What are some of the arguments?

How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Week 6: Deerskins and Slaves in the Native Southeast

This week we will continue exploring the Algonquin and Iroquoian worlds.  Our discussion will focus on the present-day southeastern U.S. and captivity in Indian country.

Points of Entry:

Yamasee War website:


http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=29505

Creek Confederacy History:

http://www.fourdir.com/creek.htm

Indian Slave Trade:


http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_indians_slavery.htm

Thoughts/Questions for blog discussion:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  What are some of the arguments?

How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Week 5: Iroquoia and the Algonquin Worlds

This week explores how Native America in the present-day North American northeast incorporated Euro-Americans into their Iroquoian and Algonquin worlds.

Points of Entry:

Deerfield Raid in New England:

http://www.1704.deerfield.history.museum/home.do

Captivity Narrative:

http://www.archive.org/details/captivity_restoration_rowlandson_0912_librivox#

Iroquoia and the fur trade:

http://www.iroquoisdemocracy.pdx.edu/html/furtrader.htm

http://www.tolatsga.org/iro.html

List and analyze 2 quotes from the readings.  What are the authors arguing in these passages?  How is this related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Week 4: Looking Out From Indian Country: Native Frontiers (1600-1700)

This week explores concepts like "frontier," "borderlands," and "Indian Country." During the 17th-18th centuries, many Native societies of the Americas experienced various forms of conquest and colonialism. Conquests, though, were sometimes ambivalent and not so clear cut.

  Ultimately, Native history was early colonial history.




Points of entry:

"Devil's Miner" website:

http://www.thedevilsminer.com/index_new.html


"Aguirre:  The Wrath of God" link:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3z828_aguirre-the-wrath-of-god-beginning_shortfilms

The account of Cabeza de Vaca, an early Spanish explorer kidnapped and sold into slavery for 7 years provides a fascinating window into the more "ambiguous" conquests that occurred during this period. See the links below for this account:


http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/one/cabeza.htm


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtRIyqLsMk&feature=related

Pueblo Revolt -

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/one/pueblo.htm

The Middle Ground/Native Ground/Facing East Reviews:

http://www.lib.niu.edu/1993/ii930734.html

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14229.html

http://www.common-place.org/vol-03/no-03/reviews/oberg.shtml

Comanches:

http://www.comanchenation.com/

http://www.nps.gov/archive/foda/Fort_Davis_WEB_PAGE/About_the_Fort/Comanches.htm

Questions for blog discussion:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  What are the authors arguing in these passages?  How is this related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Week 3: The Columbian Exchange: Or the Native American Discovery of Europe

During this week we will explore both the historical significance of 1492 and the ways it has been commemorated over the past 500 years.

Points of Entry:

Articles on Columbus Day monuments:

New bid to erect Columbus statue in Puerto Rico « Repeating Islands

http://www.transformcolumbusday.org/

Library of Congress Exhibit:

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/1492/

National Humanities Center "Columbian Exchange" website:

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntecoindian/ecolinksce.htm

Columbus Day clips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw9_dlk5-CY

Brown University controversy:

Anti

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByQRcENzOMU

pro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kySI8xyVqtA

Thoughts/Questions for blog discussion:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  What are some of the arguments?  How are they related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

short paper guidelines

Short essays are designed to cultivate your ability to extract themes and arguments from the readings while also encouraging you to develop your own informed opinion. Below is an example of a 3-page essay written during an earlier semester. It is by no means the only way to write your essay. However, it provides a sense of the way historians discuss texts and express ideas.

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Short Paper #1

Staking out new territory in Southwest borderlands studies, the readings by Brooks and Habicht-Mauche both attempt to reveal the fluidity of labor systems, gender ideology, and interregional interactions that emerged and dissipated on the Southwest/Plains borderlands over five centuries. While each author tackles different aspects of these interactions, both set out to redefine the emergence and maintenance of the borderlands economy.

In Captives and Cousins, Brooks' interdisciplinary approach boldly expands recent historical views of the Southwes borderlands.Indeed, the multiple disciplines utilized in Captives and Cousins--anthropology, archeology, literary and cultural theory, as well as oral, economic and ethnohistory—will cultivate more interdisciplinary scholarship. Incorporating a sweeping time period (16th-19th centuries), and region (extending between California and Missouri) this study follows the trajectory of a borderlands exchange economy shared within the plains, pueblo, desert, and plateau regions. Unlike previous studies that highlight the "clash of cultures," Brooks argues that the similarities between Spanish, Navajo, Pueblo, Comanche, and other communities helped to initiate and maintain a dynamic regional economic system.While significant cultural differences existed, these groups "shared an understanding of the production and distribution of wealth as conditioned by social relations of power" (p. 363).

This "common understanding" served as the basis for the exchange of slaves and captives (primarily women and children), horses, livestock (sheep and cattle), and buffalo. In particular, the exchange of slaves reinforced and expanded the system. Unlike other slave systems at the time, the captives acted as kin and played an influential diplomatic role in the region. Serving as a cultural bridge between potential enemies/allies, captives conversant in the language of both their captors and "outsiders" assisted in important negotiations. According to Brooks, slaves' diplomatic skill ensured that the captive exchange system would thrive for centuries, despite the efforts of "modernizing" state authorities like Spain, Mexico, and the United States.

Despite his “blanket” of interdisciplinary sources, Brooks glosses over and/or overlooks some important factors emerging in the borderlands.While he describes the relative autonomy of women slaves and captives, an analysis of gender fails to adequately permeate his study. Although he peppers some anecdotal accounts illustrating the role of gender, a further investigation into this question would have strengthened his argument. Additionally, his approach also neglects a key set of players involved in many of these exchanges—the pueblos of the Rio Grande.

Addressing these key issues—particularly the role of gender in the borderlands— Judith Habicht-Mauche investigates the dynamic relationship shared between labor and gender that shifted before and after Euroamerican contact. Equally as important, Habicht-Mauche highlights the interaction between Pueblo and Plains technology, goods, and ideological systems. Writing before and after Captives and Cousins,Habicht-Mauche’s articles reveal the important methodological shifts that have occurred in recent years. In “Pottery, Food, Hides, and Women,” she highlights many of these changes as archeologists moved from cultural-ecological and world systems approaches to her (and subsequently Brooks’ approach) model of kin and household-based interactions as the engine of the borderlands economy. Reexamining the archeological record of distributed Puebloan ceramic technology across the Plains, Habicht-Mauche reveals the inadequacy of these older models while advancing a more gender-based approach. Habicht-Mauche shatters the earlier approaches while revealing the importance women in changing the nature of the Pueblo-Plains frontier—a discussion she expands upon in her later article “The Shifting Role of Women and Women’s Labor on the Protohistoric Southern High Plains.”

Before turning to this article, it is important to point out another important contribution that Habicht-Mauche put forward in this earlier study—the shift in gender and labor ideology before the insertion of Euroamericans into the bison economy. As she argues, the protohistoric period ruptured older political and economic systems that preceded later changes in the post-contact period. These changes occurred, she states, at the local level. Habicht-Mauche’s later study, however, she expands on the changing role of women in relation to the expansion of the bison economy. Picking up from her earlier study and responding to some of Brooks’ oversights mentioned above, she identifies the indigenous origins of male-status building and co-option of women’s labor. As she argues, “the development of the bison-oriented, trade-based economy entailed a major shift in the organization of labor, especially along gendered lines.

While Brooks’ study serves primarily as class-based analysis revealing the emerging hierarchical shifts between wealthy sheep/horse/captive holders and poor genizaros/livestock raiders, Habicht-Mauche identifies a gender-based component forming in the rapidly expanding bison economy on the eastern edge of Brooks’ borderlands. Very importantly, though, she points out that changing work roles for women didn’t necessarily mean a complete loss of agency. However, her research suggests that women’s autonomy definitively shrunk during this period.As she argues, “highly specialized bison-hunting lifestyles on the Southern High Plains created new arenas…within which social power and status were negotiated…these new arenas tended to be more open to the actions of individual, ambitious men than to most women” (p. 54).

The readings by both Habicht-Mauche and Brooks reveal that a careful and closer look at borderlands regions quickly reveal many more intricate and dynamic processes than previously assessed. Indeed, while the “core-periphery” lexicon still proves useful, both authors illustrate that more nuanc

Week 2: Native History in the Americas before 1450

More than anything else, history is about reading, and reading is what we'll do in this course. We have LOTS of readings to tackle. However students, like historians, have limited time to read. Fortunately, there are some basic reading strategies that all historians employ making their reading more efficient, enjoyable, and useful. Take a look at this website below which highlights some of these strategies.

Active Reading Strategies, Mind Tools Reading Techniques

Points of Entry:

"Exploring the Early Americas" Exhibit

Exploring the Early Americas - Exhibitions - myLOC.gov (Library of Congress)

Lakota Winter Counts:

http://wintercounts.si.edu/

Pre-contact Meso-America

The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire (Getty Villa Exhibitions)

"Longue Duree" conference paper

http://fbc.binghamton.edu/tomich102508.pdf

Comparative view of the Americas:

World, 500-1000 A.D. | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hopi Oral History:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmmEiYICiBk

Thoughts and Questions for Discussion:

Questions for blog discussion:

List and analyze 2 quotes from the reading.  What is Charles Mann arguing in these passages?  How is this related to the larger themes of the week discussed in class?

Paper Grading Rubric

Writing is an art and sometimes difficult to grade. At the same time, writing is also a craft. This is particularly true in the field of history, where the distinction between "good" and "bad" history can be reasonably assessed. In this course, I use a grading rubric for your writing assignments. See chart below.

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Paper Grading Rubric:

Dimensions:	Grading Criteria: Excellent Paper A/A-	Grading Criteria: Good B+/B/B-	Grading Criteria: Fair C+/C/C-	Grading Criteria: Poor D+/D-/F
Thesis	Clear; stated up front; thoughtful; strong topic paragraph or sentence	Slightly unclear; no strong introduction	Unclear thesis and introduction	No thesis or introduction
Structure	Strong transitions between ideas; clear references to argument; clear arc (beginning/ middle/end)	Generally clear, but weak transitions; vague references to thesis	Somewhat coherent but weak transitions; vague or no reference to thesis	Lack of structure or coherence
Analysis	Demonstrates an understanding of the readings; connects evidence with argument	Reference to but not a clear understanding of readings; vague connection between evidence and argument	Very weak understanding of readings; little connection between evidence and argument	Unable to demonstrate analysis or understanding of sources
Evidence	Clearly highlighted; multiple examples; use of variable sources	Ambiguous use of sources; one-dimensional use	Unclear and/or little use of sources	Little or no use of evidence
Mechanics	No typos, fragments, or run-on sentences; no awkward constructions; no misuse of citations	Minor typos and grammatical errors; run-on sentences	Frequent typos, grammatical, and punctuation errors; frequent run-on sentences	Poorly written with frequent errors