Native American History Archives - Page 2 of 2

Playing Indian, by Philip Deloria (1999)

Images of American Indians are ubiquitous in contemporary US culture. Step into a convenience store and you can’t help but notice that two of the most popular tobacco brands, Redman Chewing Tobacco and Natural American Spirits, are adorned with the face of a feathered-headdress wearing chief. Approximately 2,000 high schools across the country use Native American imagery or symbolism in their name, mascots, and iconography. Sign into Netflix and you will quickly find a film with Native American characters: Disney’s Pocahontas was recently added to their library, while Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous Six, depicting bandits and Indians in the American Wild West, was the big 2015 winter release. Shopping for fashion? The geometric patterns commonly associated with the Navajos of the Southwest have covered garments on the catwalk and in fashionable stores such as Prada and Barney’s over the past year. If you follow the NFL, you will know that Washington DC’s team wear an Indian chief on their helmets and their controversial name splashed across burgundy jerseys. And with Halloween just around the corner, people dressed in Indian costumes will party with ghosts, monsters and witches at gatherings across the country. Why is the image of the American Indian so popular in American culture? What is the history behind these images? And why does the history matter?

Natural American Spirit logo (via OpenCage).

One way to answer these questions is to think about how and why white Americans have dressed or acted like Indians during the course of American history. In his classic work Playing Indian, Philip Deloria demonstrates that the act of playing Indian is as old as the USA itself. On the December 16, 1773, a group led by the Sons of Liberty boarded the Dartmouth and two other ships in Boston harbor and dumped tea into the cold water in protest over import tax. The protestors wore feathers, headdresses, and war paint and supposedly shouted Indian words in an event that would come to be known as the Boston Tea Party. The Mohawk disguises have been explained as an attempt to maintain secrecy or as a strategy to cast blame on a third party, but for Deloria they represented a political statement aimed at the English. Playing and dressing as an Indian was an act that declared a distinct American identity.

The Boston Tea Party (via Wikimedia Commons)

In Playing Indian, Deloria explores how and why Indians have been so important to those seeking to define what it is to be an authentic American. Largely focused on the activities and ideas of white men, Deloria argues that the practice of performing like an Indian has persisted in American culture from the eighteenth century through the 1990s when the book was published. He considers the specific meaning and significance of key events and organizations where people played Indian, including the Boston Tea Party, the New York Tammany Society, the development of anthropology as an academic discipline, the birth of the boy scouts, and during the counterculture movements of the 1960s. While the many examples Deloria offers demonstrate the importance of the Indian image in American culture for over two centuries, he argues that the “practice of playing Indian has clustered around two paradigmatic moments – the Revolution, which rested on the creation of a national identity, and modernity, which has used Indian play to encounter the authentic amidst the anxiety of urban industrial and postindustrial life.” Given the importance of these two moments in US History, Indian play has been hugely significant in the creation of American culture and identity.

Deloria organizes his thesis around two connected dimensions, an “axis of value” and an “axis of distance.” The “axis of value” highlights the positive and negative stereotypes of Indians in American culture. Deloria’s “axis of distance” captures the ways Indians have at times been included as part of American culture and at other moments been used as an external mirror to reflect what Americans should and should not be. For example, Indians have been presented as violent, pagan, drunken savages and thus the anti-thesis of a model American. This is an image that has largely served to justify appropriation of Indian lands and programs to eradicate Indian culture. Yet, ideas about Indians have also represented quintessential American values like freedom, individualism and a connection to nature and the land. In the revolutionary era, this positive idea of an Indian served those seeking to define themselves as distant from European culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Native Americans were cast as exemplars of a simple life, critiquing the decadence some Americans perceived during a period of rapid industrialization and growth.

The 2013 Lone Ranger movie drew criticism for its representation of Native American culture (via Jorge Figueroa).

Deloria’s wide-ranging study demonstrates that American ideas about Indians have oscillated between positive portrayals of Indian nobility and negative associations of backwardness depending on the context and motivations of the subjects. Tensions between “desire and repulsion” and “nobility and savagery,” Deloria argues, lie at the heart of American identities, so when Americans performed as Indians, they were trying to balance the positive and negative in what they thought of as American identity. But these stereotypes of Native Americans that developed from the practice of playing Indian continue to inform dealings with Native people, that keep them in subordinate social, political, legal, and economic positions. The act of playing Indian, then, matters to contemporary Native Americans.

So as Halloween rolls around, the long and complicated history of playing Indian that Deloria describes should make us all think about reaching for the faux turquoise bead jewelry, braiding our hair, or picking up a plastic bow and arrow. The costumes we wear carry political messages from a history that people may not know, but that continues to shape the experiences of Native Americans living today.

Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)

Read more by Mark Sheaves on Not Even Past:

Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)
The Web of Empire, By Alison Games (2008)
Philip of Spain, King of England, by Harry Kelsey (2012)

Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles: A Public History Project

By Caroline Murray

Los Angeles is a city famous for its Hollywood celebrities and traffic, but a new project reveals an often overlooked part of the city’s past and present: its indigenous population, cited as one of the largest among American cities. Mapping Indigenous LA (MILA) brings to life the histories and current dilemmas of LA’s indigenous people in the twenty-first century, instead of leaving them behind in the past.

MILA combats the perception that these communities have disappeared over decades of assimilation and urban growth and exist only in a colonial context. The project disrupts the traditional, chronological narrative of history with its growing number of story maps, each featuring a place or issue of significance for LA’s indigenous groups. The maps contain videos, documents, book recommendations, and other archives that record native histories to give new meaning to locations in LA.

Map of Indian Resources (via MILA).

As MILA digs deeper, beyond the traditional idea of a map, it also works to expand the meaning of indigeneity by including stories not only from the native Tongva, but also other American Indians, Pacific Islanders, and citizens of Latin American indigenous diasporas who migrated to LA. You can explore the native village and springs of Kuruvungna, read about Latin American indigenous festivals, and listen to Tongva Elders reflect on their people’s displacement. You can view modern locations of Indian healthcare and education resources in LA, which many indigenous people struggle to find. MILA doesn’t allow its maps to provide only one definition or narrative; instead, they offer intricate, multifaceted histories that reflect the diversity of LA’s indigenous communities.

tongva_sacred_springs_-_serra_springs_-_kuruvungna_springs

Historic landmark sign marking the location of Serra Springs, called Kuruvungna by the native Gabrieleno Tongva people. The springs were a natural fresh water source for the Tongva people (via Wikimedia Commons).

The American Indian Education story map perhaps best demonstrates all of MILA’s goals. Multiple perspectives color the stories and share different sides of indigenous communities’ complex relationship with American education systems. The pain inflicted by Indian schools, the worry over the loss of native languages, and the hope new cultural programs are bringing to LA can all be felt while exploring the map.

Tongva House (via author).

The maps not only create awareness among non-indigenous people; they almost more importantly provide a digital network for indigenous groups to learn from and relate to each other in ways they might not have before. MILA wishes to add more maps and encourages people to create their own to foster connection between different communities. While the subjects and perspectives in the maps vary, they all communicate a common message from indigenous groups in LA: We are here, and we will be heard.

You may also like:
Cameron McCoy recommends L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present by Josh Sides (2003).
Erika Bsumek explores several titles related to Navajo Arts and the History of the U.S. West.
Nakia Paker reviews Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013).

US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

Erika Bsumek discusses Navajo Artisans at the Trading Post, a late nineteenth-century Navajo rug held in the Art and Art History Library Collection at the University of Texas, and recommends more books on Navajo Arts and the History of the U.S. West

Book Recommendations:

Nathan E. McCormack recommends Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin, 2008).

And here is another from Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, (University of California Press, 2003), suggested by Henry Wiencek.

Continuing with an environmental approach to history, Hannah Ballard recommends The Republic of Nature, by Mark Fiege (University of Washington Press, 2012)

Hannah Ballard reviews 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End, by Scott W. Berg (Vintage, 2012).

Nakia Parker recommends Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

Jacqueline Jones suggests Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams.

James Jenkins reviews The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, by Alan Taylor (Vintage, 2010)

And finally, Erika Bsumek, David Kinkela, and Mark A. Lawrence highlight their broad environmental history Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History, (Oxford University Press, 2013), and five great books on the Environment on History & History in the Environment.

Erika Bsumek and Kyle Shelton show the importance of studying history and discuss their innovative course bringing the Humanities and STEM together, ‘Building America: Engineering Society and Culture, 1868-1980’.

From 15 Minute History: The Social Legacy of Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson’s presidency marked the introduction of a real maverick to the White House: a frontiersman from Tennessee, not part of the Washington elite, who brought the ideas of the people to the national government — or, at least that’s what his supporters claimed. But Jackson’s lasting political legacy instead comes from expanding the vote to all white males (not just landholder), and the tragic effects of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Guest Michelle Daneri from UT’s Department of History helps us sort through the political forces that brought Jackson to office, and the long lasting impact of his presidency.

Texas:

Nakia Parker explores an exhibit on the First Texans.

Neel Baumgartner discusses the history of Big Bend National Park.

And finally, Nathan Jennings highlights three fascinating sources held in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin:

Great Books on Women’s History: United States

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Here are some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in the United States.

Penne Restad recommends:

Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014).

A lively, often surprising, narrative history that chronicles the adventures of Wonder Woman, the comic strip devoted to her prowess, and Marston, the man who imagined her, in the center of the struggle for women’s rights in the U.S.

Erika Bsumek recommends:

Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (2011).

In 1851, the 13 year old Oatman was part of a Mormon family traveling west. She was captured by the Yavapai Indians and then traded to the Mohave, who adopted her. The book tells her story and provides some valuable context on the various Mormon sects, the tensions and troubles faced by American Indians in the face of American expansion, and how one young woman experienced it all.

Laurie Green recommends:

Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. (2013)

Think you know who Rosa Parks was? Jeanne Theoharis’s biography will change your understanding of the woman who became famous for triggering the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 when she was “too tired” to relinquish her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The book tells you the real story of Parks’s militant activism from the 1930s to the 1990s and her frustration with being recognized as a symbol, not a leader.

Emilio Zamora recommends:

Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed; The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (2009)

The book is a re-examination of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the longest running Mexican American civil rights organizations. Orozco is a well-known historian who incorporates women and gender in her histories of Mexican Americans. In this instance, women are placed at center stage in the cause for equal rights and dignity.

Jackie Jones recommends:

Ellen Fitzpatrick, The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (2016).

A great read and couldn’t be more timely! The book focuses on three women candidates for the presidency: Victoria Woodhull (ran in 1872), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972).

Daina Berry recommends:

Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2016)

From the UNC Press website:

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia’s prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women’s presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women’s lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Charlotte Canning recommends:

Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008)

An award-winning cultural history of the African American women who were variety performers on chorus lines, in burlesques, cabarets, and vaudeville from 1890 to 1945. Despite the oppression they experienced, these women shaped an emerging urban popular culture. They pioneered social dances like the cakewalk and the Charleston. It is an ambitious view of popular culture and the ways in which women were integral to its definition.

Bruce Hunt and Megan Raby recommend:

Kimberly Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014)

While there is an enormous literature on the reception of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, this is the first book to examine the responses of women. This book is a lively account of how ideas about human evolution figured in debates over women’s rights in the late 19th century, by a recent UT American Studies PhD.

Megan Seaholm recommends:

Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (2015)

Nelson provides an excellent addition to the growing literature about the women’s health movement that began in the 1960s. She concentrates on reproductive health and reproductive rights from abortion referral services organized before Roe v. Wade through the National Black Women’s Health Project organized in 1984. This is a good read and an important contribution.

Mark Lawrence recommends:

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1990)

Elaine Tyler May examines the resurgence of traditional gender roles in the years after the Second World War, arguing that a desire to enjoy postwar prosperity and to escape the dangers of the nuclear age drove Americans back to conventional norms. The book brilliantly blends women’s, social, political, and international history.

Judith Coffin recommends:

Nancy Cott, Public Vows : A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000)

The changing stakes of marriage for the nation and for men and women — gay and straight. Readable, smart, and connected to the present. Nancy Cott helped write several amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs in the marriage cases before the Supreme Court.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

by Nakia Parker

For decades, scholars peered at the painful and complex topic of American slavery through a purely “black-white” lens—in other words, black slaves who had white masters. The sad reality that some Native Americans, (in particular, the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, or “the Five Tribes”) also participated in chattel and race-based slavery, was rarely acknowledged in the historical annals. Only in the latter part of the 20th century did historians begin to address this oversight. Several groundbreaking studies recognized the momentous repercussions of this practice for Native and African American populations alike during the antebellum era and down to the present day. Barbara Krauthamer, a professor of Native American and African American history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, adds an exhaustive and compelling contribution to the research in this area. The first full-length monograph chronicling chattel slavery in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, Krauthamer amply demonstrates how both before and after the era of Indian Removal in the mid-nineteenth century slavery also intersected with issues of race and gender in complicated ways.

Krauthamer tracks white commodification and enslavement of Choctaw and Chickasaw bodies starting in the late seventeenth century and its transition to the commodification and enslavement of black bodies by Choctaw and Chickasaw slaveholders in the eighteenth century. In addition, Krauthamer adroitly debunks the myth that the main cause for American Indian participation in chattel slavery stemmed from their desire for European, and later American goods, unable to resist the inescapable forces of the market economy and capitalism. Krauthamer acknowledges the catastrophic economic consequences of the American seizure of Indian lands, of the racist rhetoric that Native Americans needed to be properly “civilized,” and of the exigencies caused by depletion of the deer population, which severely curtailed trade opportunities. But she persuasively argues that the decision to engage in chattel slaveholding resulted from a conscious and deliberate choice on the part of Indian slaveholders to embrace racial ideology that “degraded blackness and associated it exclusively with enslavement.” For some influential and wealthy members of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, adopting race-based slavery provided the most efficient way to maintain an increasingly tenuous hold on political and cultural autonomy in the face of aggressive American expansion, while pursuing self-interested economic and diplomatic goals.

Holmes_Colbert — *Holmes Colbert, a prominent leader in the Chickasaw Nation and the owner of several enslaved African-Americans (Wikimedia Commons)*

Krauthamer also addresses the “leniency thesis” that many early scholars of Native American history advocated — that life under the yoke of an Indian master was somehow more “benevolent” than enslaved life under whites — but that has been successfully challenged, by Tiya Miles and Claudio Saunt among others. By the mid-nineteenth century, laws existed in both nations that banned intermarriage between blacks and Indians: for example, Choctaw lawmakers allowed white men to achieve citizenship through marriage to a Choctaw woman, but forbade “a negro or descendent of a negro” from enjoying the same privilege; likewise, in the Chickasaw nation, the punishment for “publicly taking up with a negro slave” was a steep fine, whipping, or the ultimate punishment, banishment from the nation and the dissolving of all kinship ties. Krauthamer also cites accounts from WPA slave narratives detailing instances of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Native American owners.

*Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)*

Krauthamer also shows that despite horrific conditions, enslaved people living in “Indian country” engaged in covert and overt forms of resistance. One particularly compelling experience of slave resistance concerns the story of Prince, who, angered that his Choctaw owner Richard Harkins failed to give his slaves a Christmas celebration, brutally murdered him and then unceremoniously dumped the body into the river in 1858. Prince finally confessed, but implicated his Aunt Lucy in the crime. Although Lucy denied her involvement and no evidence existed to prove that she participated in the murder, Lavinia Harkins, the widow of the murdered man and thus also Lucy’s owner, demanded that Lucy be burned alive along with Prince. This harrowing tale highlights the intersections of race, gender, and power relations that informed the interactions between “black slaves and Indian masters” in Indian Territory.

PI013 — *Peter Pitchlynn, or “Hat-choo-tuck-nee,” a Choctaw chief and later tribal delegate to Washington (LC-USZ62-58502, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)*

Even Emancipation and the end of the Civil War did not bring immediate relief to the enslaved living in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Although the Choctaw and Chickasaw sided with the Confederacy during the conflict, the United States considered them to be separate political polities; therefore, the abolition of slavery as stated in the Thirteenth Amendment did not apply in Indian Territory. Instead, the Choctaw/Chickasaw treaty of 1866 outlined the details of emancipation, citizenship, and land claims for the Freedmen, but inextricably (and problematically) linked these issues with Indian sovereignty, land rights, and annuities—one could not be obtained without the other. This knotty situation became further complicated with the passage of laws enacted by Choctaw and Chickasaw political leaders that seem eerily similar to the “Black Codes” of the Reconstruction era South. Former slaves in Choctaw country who did not have a work contract could be arrested for “vagrancy” by the lighthorsemen (police force) and then be auctioned off to the highest bidder—slavery by another name. Once again, the now emancipated slaves in Indian Territory, in particular African-American men, engaged in resisting these harsh measures and formed groups that lobbied for political and economic justice before the Freedmen’s Bureau and Indian leaders.

Riverside, the home of Benjamin Franklin Colbert at Colbert's Ferry — *Riverside, the home of Benjamin Colbert in Colbert’s Ferry, OK (Oklahoma Historical Society)*

Black Slaves, Indian Masters proves a much needed addition to African American and Native American histories of slavery. Krauthamer uses an exhaustive number of sources to bolster her argument–slave narratives, government records, personal correspondence of Indian leaders such as diaries and letters, and official papers of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Her work not only expands the lens of the study of slavery beyond the “black and white,” but also can provide insight into the current tensions and issues of citizenship and identity existing between descendants of the enslaved and nations such as the Cherokee and Seminole today.

In 2011, Dr. Krauthamer was a fellow at The Institute for Historical Studies at UT-Austin. During this time, she delivered a workshop “Enslaved women and the Politics of Self-Liberation.”

You can fin d Black Slaves, Indian Masters here. And be sure to explore Envisioning Emancipation, a powerful collection of photographs portraying the lives of enslaved and freed African-Americans that Dr. Krauthamer compiled with renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis.

Erika Bsumek on Navajo Artisans at the Trading Post

In 1935, when Navajo weaver Lousia Alcott wrote to Indian trader Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr. requesting aid due to an illness, she reminded Hubbell of their long-standing, mutually beneficial economic relationship. “Whenever I make a Navaho rug,” wrote Alcott, “I always take it to your store in Tenebito.” Referencing the quality of the rugs that she made, she chided him for the fact that she felt her labor was occasionally undervalued: “Sometimes the price (paid for the rugs) is so low I do not get much out of what I weaved.” Alcott asserted that Hubbell owed her the groceries she needed not simply because she had been underpaid for rugs in the past but also because “I do much for you” and “I help you all the time.” Thus, Alcott’s main point was that a mutually beneficial trade relationship hinged upon both parties’ willingness to “help” each other. She concluded her letter by placing an order for flour, coffee, sugar, and baking powder. Hubbell provided Alcott with the goods she requested because he too recognized the importance in keeping his customers and workers alive and happy.

This correspondence between a Navajo weaver and a Trading Post owner suggests that trade relationships on Indian reservations were complex affairs, not easily reduced to economic formulas and principles. Hubbell purchased Alcott’s rugs because his business depended on the products Navajos had to sell. The fact that Navajos also needed the products traders stocked fortified his position on the reservation, socially as well as economically. Even so, the correspondence also reveals that exchange relationships extended beyond single economic transactions. These exchanges followed modern economic trends, but they did not always conform to straightforward market exchanges that ended once goods and services changed hands. Alcott’s request and remonstration, demonstrate that social accountability had a role in the business of trading.

Except for brief periods in American history, cross-cultural trade relationships between American Indians and non-Indians were plagued by problems of communication, uneven power relations, and a seemingly unyielding demand for the natural resources that Euro or Anglo Americans wanted from indigenous peoples. Most scholars who have documented such encounters tend to focus on trade between Indians and whites in the early contact or colonial era. Yet, trade between American Indians and non-Indians continued well into the twentieth century. The escalation of industrialization, the growth of vast transportation systems, and the rise of a consumption-oriented American public influenced trade relationships between Navajos and non-Navajos. Exchanges at trading posts reflected more than immediate economic interests or cultural expectations; both the national demand for Navajo-made products and the popular representation of Navajo producers as “primitive” artists played a part in this apparently localized trade. We can see these factors in action when we examine the operation of Navajo trading posts.

So, what form did exchanges between Navajos and traders assume as a result of the melding of broad market trends and local concerns? How did pre-conceived notions, cultural mores, and power relationships mediate and affect connections between Navajos and traders from the 1890s through the 1930s? Trading posts were important because that’s where Navajos learned of American consumer demand for the products that they made and because traders shipped the majority of Navajo-made goods from these trading posts to consumers across the nation. And, it was at trading posts that a large majority of Navajos had their first exposure to a consumption-oriented marketplace. Navajos used trading posts to enter the modern industrial economy.

By the late nineteenth century, the term Indian trader described a non-Indian (usually a Euro-American or Hispanic) who exchanged manufactured goods with American Indians for raw materials or handmade crafts on an Indian reservation. By the early twentieth century some businessmen, like Julius Gans of Santa Fe and Maurice Maisel of Albuquerque, had co-opted the term for their own purposes because it signified not only an occupation but also a mythologized lifestyle. By 1900, the trading post itself had become a key economic center and one symbolic of Indian-white encounters more generally.

The commerce that developed between Navajos and traders on the reservation existed because the Navajo economy had been transformed in two fundamental ways. First, the reservation system regulated the movement of Navajos and strictly limited the hunting practices and trade networks that had antedated 1867. In addition, the inter-tribal raiding, a centuries-old method of acquisition among the once nomadic Navajos, had been outlawed. As a result, Navajos developed new subsistence, agricultural, and survival skills that revolved around trading posts. As Navajos manufactured goods to meet non-Navajos’ demand, they also consumed the staples available at the trading posts such as calico and velvet, canned milk, peaches and tomatoes, and manufactured sewing machines, hammers, and hoes. These actions linked them into a larger economic network. Navajos accrued both credit and debt at trading posts. Some debts were seasonal in nature while others could last for years.

Traders like Lorenzo Hubbell and his sons created continual commerce in an area known for its seasonal business cycles by sponsoring ceremonies, accommodating tourists, trading with Navajos, and selling to external markets. When trade with Navajos slowed in the late summer and early fall, tourists would show up. J.L. Hubbell, for instance, hosted thousands of tourists per year in Ganado and Oraibi, Arizona. When the tourist season ended, Navajos again provided the bulk of the business into the winter months. Curio stores and retailers placed large orders for Navajo made jewelry and blankets in November and December to stock-up for the holiday season. After that, in the lean winter season, traders again relied on Navajos who gathered wood, pine nuts, and other resources to supply posts or to be sold in specialty markets. By early spring traders acquired lambs for trade and Navajo sheep for wool to buy or sell. Cash rarely changed hands between trading partners. Instead, throughout the year, Navajo weavers brought in rugs, jewelry, or raw materials to trade for staple items. Traders accepted pawn, to ensure that Navajos would continue to patronize their stores.

Bartered exchanges reflected varied cultural manipulations on both sides of the counter. For instance, one weaver in particular, Mrs. Glish seemed to understand how to use white gender norms to her advantage. Mrs. Glish wove beautiful rugs but, according to Lippencott, was such a tough barterer that it was difficult “for the men behind the counter…to deal with her.” Bill Lippencott especially had a hard time bargaining with the weaver because she had a tendency to weep. On the other hand, Sallie Lippencott Wagner claimed to have the higher hand and she asserted that she was not fooled by Mrs. Glish’s tears and would not pay an elevated price when the weaver cried. Once the price was agreed upon, weavers conducted additional business with traders by obtaining goods. Traders reciprocated by providing something extra, usually canned tomatoes or peaches, in order to maintain good will. Such strategies were used across Navajo country in trading exchanges. While exchanges tended to benefit traders more than weavers, trading post exchanges show us that the nature of trade, and the meanings associated with it, depended upon a mutual understanding of both contemporary economic practices and cultural mores.

Great Books on Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Recent years have seen a real flowering of scholarship about the popular music of the early twentieth century. Here are a few of my favorites—and a little something extra.

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009).

An essential book for anyone interested in the history of popular music in the United States, Selling Sounds charts the emergence of a cohesive—and ubiquitous—music industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The fascinating characters that populate Suisman’s story are no lovers of music. They are savvy business men who learned how to transform disembodied sound (whether on sheet music or phonograph records) into hard cash. They also set the template for how music would be marketed for the next 100 years. No book tells the story better.

Elena Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (2011).

Radios became common in American homes during the 1920s. They brought the world into the family room in unprecedented ways. While much of scholarship on radio focuses on the establishment of major national broadcasting networks, The Listener’s Voice reveals the rollicking world of US radio before the majors seized control. Early radio often depended on its listeners to provide content. Through phone calls and letters, listeners created thriving participatory communities over the air. It was more akin to the vibrant world of early internet forums than to the homogenizing, on-way transmissions of later radio and television networks.

John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 (2009).

This wonderful book addresses some of the themes I explore in Segregating Sound—music, race, folklore, and money—from a different angle. Indian Blues tells the fascinating story of the struggle over music and musical meaning between government officials, teachers, and Native Americans in the early twentieth century. While government sponsored programs on reservations and in Indian boarding schools used music as a means to suppress Native resistance and collective memory, many Native Americans used music—be it traditional, new commercial pop styles, or combinations of both—to assert Native autonomy, escape the confines of government proscriptions, and get paid. Fresh, innovative, and well told, Indian Blues offers a story you won’t find anywhere else.

Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007).

This is a slim book about pop diva Celine Dion’s top-selling album featuring “My Heart Will Go On,” better known as the theme from the movie Titanic. It is also one of the best pieces of music writing I have read in years. Wilson, the pop music critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, admits he is not a Dion fan. He then systematically explores her global appeal to discover what he might be missing. The result is brilliant meditation on aesthetics, taste, cultural politics, and pop music history. At times touching and often hilarious, this beautifully written book changed the way I hear music.

Great Books on The Rise of American Capitalism

by H. W. Brands

Ron Chernow. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. The best combination of narrative and analysis on the banking house that made J. P. Morgan the towering financial figure of his time.

Matthew Josephson. The Robber Barons:The Great American Capitalists. The classic muckraking account of the generation of industrialists and financiers who built modern American capitalism. More than any other book, this one is responsible for the shadow the captains of industry still labor under in history.

Jacob Riis. How the Other Half Lives. Danish-immigrant-turned-investigative-journalist prowls the Lower East Side with notepad and camera in hand, recording and depicting the lives of the desperately poor.

Booker T. Washington. Up from Slavery: An Autobriography. The best-titled memoir in American history and one of the best overall. Recounts the life of the great African American leader, who rose from bondage to international fame by dint of intelligence, shrewdness and sheer hard work.

William Riordon. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. A delightful primer on big-city machine politics, by a prominent politico. The machines have largely vanished, but Plunkitt’s philosophy still goes far to explain American politics.

Willa Cather. My Antonia. A beautifully crafted evocation of life on the Plains frontier, which was disappearing even as Cather wrote.

Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. The last days of the free Sioux, as told by one of their medicine men.

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