Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1998, pp. 47.
Abstract
Students of North American Indian history should applaud Miller, Calloway, and Sattler for producing this splendid reference guide. The volume extends the work of Francis Paul Prucha, who edited two bibliographies referencing thousands of books, journals, news articles, governmental documents, and other sources on Indian history and Indian-white relations. The tremendous growth in scholarship regarding the American Indian past would have been far less impressive without Prucha's contribution. The compilers of this new volume, working under the aegis of the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center, have made it possible for that growth in scholarship to continue.
Increasingly, as the compilers point out, the study of the Indian past is crossing the boundaries of academic disciplines. Between 1985 and 1990 many historians, anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, geographers, legal scholars, and others realized the advantages of producing works that combine archival research with anthropological fieldwork, oral history, and consultations with Indian communities. While this bibliography, like Prucha's works, cites the standard histories of Indian wars, governmental policy, trade, and missions in its thirteen chapters, it also includes references to works in such fields as Indian ethnohistory, social history, legal history and Indian law, environmental history, and Native American literature.
Although the bibliography's comprehensive index guides users readily to a particular topic, students of the "New" Indian history will especially want to examine the chapters on the growing fields of ethnohistory and Indian social life. The chapter on ethnohistory divides references according to the geographical location of an Indian group and provides numerous sources on US and Canadian tribal cultures. The chapter on Indian social life includes works on Indian education, women and women's experiences, demography, health and medicine, and images and stereotypes of Indians.
The D'Arcy McNickle Center has also sponsored New Directions in American Indian History, a volume of bibliographic essays edited by Calloway that examines trends in Indian scholarship from 1980 to 1985. Although an excellent historiography, it is not comprehensive and has not proven as useful to researchers as have the volumes of bibliographic citations. In the future, the Center's staff intends to produce additional volumes of bibliographic essays and of bibliographic citations on an alternating basis. One would hope that the volumes containing citations would take precedence. We beggars cannot be choosers, however. The compilers of this bibliography deserve an ovation for their work. Writings in Indian History is a tremendous accomplishment.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln