The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History

Frederick E. Hoxie, one of the pivotal figures in Native American history since his publication of A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (1984), has produced an outstanding state-of-scholarship anthology that demonstrates the field’s explosive change and growth. In his introduction, Hoxie notes that the “New Indian History” that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s came from three roughly concomitant developments: the maturation of the ethnohistorical method, the rise of the powerful neoprogressive interpretation of American history, and the emergence of Indigenous “Red Power” political activism. He points to three works—Robert Berkhofer’s essay, “The Political Context of a New Indian History,” Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Vine Deloria, Jr.’s, Custer Died for Your Sins—as representative of the respective forces that helped transform historical thinking about the Native past. Scholars who had ignored Indians, characterized them as noble or ignoble...