The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History

Assembling a collection of essays for an Oxford handbook that adequately covers the scope of its subject can prove a daunting task. Frederick E. Hoxie, in this impressive volume, renders the job even more difficult by considering history “defined broadly, as an enterprise taken up also by an array of talented people ranging from anthropologists, literary critics, and journalists to demographers, social critics, and artists” (pp. 2–3). The result is a book that, while admirable in the aggregate, is uneven in the quality of its articles. Hoxie, a leading historian of Native America, takes as his starting point the “new Indian history,” first articulated by Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. in 1971, which foregrounds the experiences of American Indians (in place of the old Turnerian imperialist history of white expansion throughout the continent). He then builds outward from there, bringing together both native and nonnative scholars, ranging from graduate students to the most senior scholars of the Native American experience. Following Hoxie's excellent introduction, the volume is divided into three broad sections. The first deals with chronological history from precontact (“America in 1492” by the anthropologist Cameron B. Wesson) to the present (“Contemporary History: Native America in the Twenty-First Century” by the journalist Paul DeMain). The second deals with regional and tribal histories (e.g., “The Plains” by Jeffrey Ostler and “Iroquoia” by Timothy J. Shannon). The final section deals with “big themes,” from treaty making to gender and sexuality and the history of American Indian art

Library science · Media studies · Sociology · Subject (documents · White (mutation · Anthropology · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology

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