Wilcomb E. Washburn

The Historical Context of American Indian Legal Problems

Few people realize that American Indians comprise the only minority group which possesses a special legal status within the United States. Although they are citizens like everybody else, they are also, by virtue of their tribal affiliations, possessed of special rights. This special status has puzzled and sometimes irritated white Americans. Indeed, so august a body as the Supreme Court of the State of Washington, in Makah Indian Tribe v. Clallam County observed: 1

The Great Plains from the arrival of the horse to 1885

The mid-seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries were times of tremendous change for the Native peoples of the Plains. They seized new opportunities presented by the arrival of Europeans and by the subsequent expansion of settlers from the United States and Canada into the trans-Mississippi West. Native peoples adapted new technologies to their own needs, elaborated and transformed their basic social and cultural institutions, and helped to create a multiethnic society in the West. For some Native groups the new opportunities enabled expansion and domination of neighboring peoples. The histories of others were shaped by a sometimes unsuccessful struggle to resist domination and dispossession. Through time, alliances shifted, as did the balance of power. Eventually, the Native peoples were overwhelmed by American and Canadian expansion and forced onto small reserves where they continued to struggle to hold on to the things they valued and to determine for themselves how they would change in adapting to new circumstances. Throughout the centuries, the decisions they made helped shape North American history. Some of the Native peoples who occupied the Plains when Europeans first arrived in the mid—sixteenth century had been there for several hundred years or longer. Others were more recent immigrants. Over the next two centuries, more groups moved into the region, peoples who were fleeing wars among Native groups east of the Mississippi that had been brought on by European rivalries. The Great Plains region extended west from the lowland river bottom systems of the Missouri and Lower Mississippi, and gradually ascended in elevation through the grasslands, to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

The Northern Interior, 1600 to modern times

The postcontact experience of the Native peoples of the boreal forest zone has been fundamentally different from that of aboriginal groups living in all other areas of North America. The fur trade has remained important for Subarctic Natives ever since they first encountered Europeans. In most places Europeans have not pushed them off the land because extensive agriculture is not possible. Native languages continue to flourish. Apart from the fur traders, it is the missionaries and government agents who have had the greatest effect on the Native population. Yet, even these officials had little impact on the Natives before the early part of the twentieth century. This means the continuity with the recent past is very powerful in the Northern Interior. Today Native societies strongly reflect their aboriginal roots, two to four centuries of fur-trading traditions, the work of missionaries, and most recently, the impact of government programs. The Northern Interior has what outsiders perceive to be a hostile climate, where extremes, not averages, govern life. Summers are fleeting; winters are severe. The boreal forest extends from near the Labrador coast west-northwest almost 5,500 kilometers into central Alaska. However, it is by no means an unbroken forest. The eastern two-thirds of the region is the land of the rocky Canadian Shield, where continental glaciers stripped vast portions of the uplands bare of soil so they do not support extensive tree growth. In this Shield country, forests primarily grow in the sheltered lowlands beside the countless lakes, rivers, and streams.

Agricultural chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands

The long and complex history of the eastern United States prior to European contact has often been viewed as being largely peripheral to, and derivative from, cultural developments in Mesoamerica. This tendency to look south of the border has been particularly pronounced in attempts to account for the agricultural chiefdoms that emerged around A.D. 1000, and flourished across much of the eastern United States right up to the arrival of Europeans. These were the largest and most hierarchical indigenous societies to develop north of Mexico. At first glance, a proposed derivation of the principal features of these agricultural chiefdoms from Mesoamerica does not seem unreasonable. There are obvious, if only general, parallels in public architecture, iconography, socio-political organization, and economy. The Mississippian chiefdoms of the East constructed flat-topped, rectangular mounds, sometimes of considerable size, arranged around open plazas. Such mound-plaza areas were the central focus of fortified civic-ceremonial centers that often had a sizable resident population. In addition, Mississippian societies were markedly hierarchical. Their constituent kin units or clans were ranked, with political and religious power and authority maintained, through inheritance, in the highest ranking clans. Elaborate iconographic systems developed in Mississippian chiefdoms, reflecting and supporting both their hierarchical structure and their larger worldview. Some of the elements of these iconographic systems (e.g., snakes, raptorial birds, costumed dancers, trophy heads) have vaguely Mesoamerican parallels encouraging a search for connections south of the border. The important role of two Mesoamerican crop plants – maize ( Zea mays ) and beans ( Phaseolus vulgaris ) – in the agricultural economy of Mississippian societies also suggests Mesoamerican connections, with the shift to maize-centered agriculture in eastern North America between A.D. 800 and 1000 corresponding to the initial emergence of Mississippian chiefdoms.