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Signatures and Thumbprints: Ethnicity among the White Earth, Anishinaabeg, 1889–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Melissa L. Meyer
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Extract

Historians have often portrayed American Indian populations as relatively homogeneous. Notorious in this regard is the genre of formulaic tribal histories, in which individuals or subgroups are scarcely seen and amorphous tribes merely react to U.S. policy directives and agents’ actions (Clifton 1979; Iverson 1984). When internal differences are noted, they tend to be lumped into dichotomized categories, with little attention given to their composition or to the historical processes from which they arose. Hence the literature is replete with references to traditionalists and progressives, Christians and pagans, and mixed bloods and full bloods, to name only a few. But history does not unfold in fixed oppositional stages, and dichotomizing these terms, even if they were employed by historical participants themselves, reveals little about social processes. They indicate, instead, a recognition that intratribal heterogeneity was increasing, perhaps in patterned ways (Clifton 1989).

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , Fall 1990 , pp. 305 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1990 

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