Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
J. Daniel Rogers' Objects of Change evaluates Arikara Indian contact with Euro-Americans and with Euro-American technology. He uses the Arikara material culture (or archaeological) record to determine the interactive process between the Arikara and the Euro-Americans. This process of interactions or "acculturation" was "neither standardized nor prescribed" among the Native Americans of the Great Plains (p. 1). "In the long run, the interaction strategies used by both Euro-Americans and natives resulted in the transformation of peoples and their material cultures, but the results were often different and the process almost never the same," Rogers writes. "The single overriding fact of all contact situations is that each culture operates according to its own set of expectations and works to maintain a viable system" (p. 4).
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.