This essay collection rests on the straightforward premise

Last updated: 3/1/2024

This essay collection rests on the straightforward premise that American Indians are crucial to the teaching of U S history Yet some might ask Why Indians The clearest response is that North America was not a new world in 1492 but a very old one with a history far lengthier than what has come since More specifically at the time of European invasion there was no part of North America that was not claimed and ruled by sovereign Indian regimes The Europeans whose descendants would cre ate the United States did not come to an unsettled wilderness they grafted their colonies and settlements onto long existent Indian homelands that constituted the entire continent We cannot understand European and Anglo American colonial worlds unless we understand the Native worlds from which they took their shape It seems an odd realization that in teaching American history we discuss Indian sovereignty and bordered domains primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when they were most under assault by U S policies that sought to dispossess Indian nations of land and disenfranchise them of their power Thus we tend to talk about Indian sovereignty in negative terms as something they were always in the process of losing over the course of U S history Yet we need to address sovereignty in positive terms because we cannot begin to understand how Euro American colonialism wore away at it unless we first know how Indians exercised power over the land and vis vis their Native and European neighbors Thus we must begin by acknowledging the fundamental essence of Indian sovereignty the power a nation exerts within unambiguous bor ders More specifically we must recognize how Indians understood territory and boundaries how they extended power over geographic space and how their practices of claiming marking and understanding territory differed not only from Europeans but also from each other s In my own research if one compares the border marking of hunter gatherers sedentary agriculturalists and mounted hunters and raiders in the region the couthern plains one finds that residency