American Indian History to 1877 - BYU - Midterm 1 - Pulsipher

Fall 2026

Logic of elimination

In early US survey, historians teach that early American needs for labor in the south transformed from a system of indentured servitude from the British Isles to race-based African slavery in the 1600s

Settler-colonial approach: The desire to displace Natives from their land rather than exploit their labors for colonial profit

Hunger for land drove the logic of elimination

Settler colonialism

A type of European expansion that resulted not in overseas empires but in “societies in which Europeans have settled, where their descendants have [become and] remained politically dominant over indigenous peoples, and where a heterogeneous society has developed in class, ethnic and racial terms”

They had much more elaborate and political economic infrastructures

It is misleading to refer to Settler Colonialism in the past tense

Extractive colonialism

There to just take resources rather than having the intent to take land

Gold, resources, people, spices, furs

Oral history

Narratives/Myths/Stories passed down through oral tradition

Some are still not written down, this is because of oral traditions

Native origin stories

The Book of Mormon narrative

“the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians”

“Among” is important!!!!

Have some Lamanite ancestry

Room for additional diversity

Better aligns with science and its own doctrines

Native Accounts

Sacred stories and creation stories “provide the authority for existing social institutions” - William Simmons

They have meaning and purpose to cultural life, connected people to a place and a community

Bering land bridge

first proposed in 1590

Theory that Natives came from Asia through Alaska

Kennewick man

Discovered in 1996 in Washington

Anthropologist’s reconstruction of Kennewick man’s appearance

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

Competing explanations for origin

Umatilla Indians’ response: This is decoration of the body and a violation of our most deeply held religious beliefs. We have always been here

Can these ideas coexist?

Both sides have to give up something, which is not easy to do

What happened to Kennewick man?

We got better at DNA testing

Found a connection between the man and natives

Find ways for natives to talk to scientists and vice versa

NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990)

Requires federal agencies (museums, universities, local government) to return Native American human remains and significant cultural items to their rightful communities

DNA testing

controversial because of ideas of percentages

Some tribes take membership not based off of DNA

DNA testing is not good enough to distinguish one tribe from another

Native views of DNA testing: Scientists (not really Native) want to turn history into another immigrant narrative -> “We’re all immigrants, we’re equal, you have no special claims to anything”

DNA won’t solve the blood requirements

Brigham Young was in favor of learning science and religion and one not overtaking the other.

Cahokia

near present-day St. Louis MO

Estimated population 20,000

Estimated time period 900-1550 AD

Suddenly abandoned

Cahokia was unique, there was no city this large and dense at the time

Andrew Jackson’s opinion of Ancient American mound:

“Memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes”

Purpose for the flat top pyramids?

We don’t really know, maybe the center of a ceremonial complex

Ask the native peoples - oral histories!

Huhugam (Hohokam)

One of the castles in Arizona

part of their cities

Based agriculture from the monsoon season

Irrigation systems

Great Law of Peace

Grand council of chiefs that managed inter-tribal affairs while leaving individual nations to run their own local matters (not from notes or slides)

Tadodaho

Leader of the Onondaga Nation before the formation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Great law of Peace) (not from notes or slides)

Degonawidah

Indigenous prophet and spiritual leader credited with founding the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (not from the notes or slides)

Jikonsaseh

Mother of Nations

co-founder of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy

(not from the notes or slides)

Las Casas

Was for the Natives

His thoughts:

• Indians are fully human and rational

• have an advanced civilization

• have natural rights, including liberty, so cannot be enslaved

• should be treated kindly to encourage conversion

Sepulveda

NOT for the Natives

His thoughts:

• Indians are inferior

• are uncivilized

• violate natural law through cannibalism, they also have tyranny so they have no rights

• Encomienda necessary to raise Indians from “beasts” into men

Stadial Theory (or theory of "stages")

How to attain “civilization”:

• Stages of Social Evolution

  • Hunting and gathering

  • Pastoralism/nomadism

  • Agriculture, permanent settlements

  • Commerce, cities

Doctrine of Discovery

an international legal and religious principle that gave Christian European nations the right to claim land, sovereignty, and ownership over territories occupied by non-Christian Indigenous peoples (pased from AI)

Universal natural law/Law of nations

European concept

• Uncivilized nations were incapable of just rule

• Misrule (tyranny, cannibalism) should be opposed

• International Law of Nations:

  • Freedom of trade,

  • Freedom of the seas

    • Land on enemy shore, they have to give me water and food

Vacuum Domicilium

English justification for settlement

“The land is idle so therefore we can take it”

Columbian Exchange

• Americas TO Europe, Africa, and Asia (lots of foods and agriculture)

• Europe, Africa, and Asia TO Americas (foods, grains, livestock, diseases)

Deskilling

Losing the ability to do certain practices (linked to Economic Exchange)

Biological exchange

• Europeans gave TO New World

  • Domesticated Animals

  • Grains, plants, weeds

  • Diseases: smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, diphtheria, bubonic plague, etc

• Native Americans gave TO Europe

  • Plants: corn, potatoes, cassava, tomatoes, tobacco, etc

  • Disease: syphilis

Economic exchange

Fur trade

Wampum revolution: Drew from preexisting Native tradition, European metal technology

Benefits of economic exchange:

• Metal cooking pots could be placed directly on fire

  • People treasured it

• Metal tools allowed greater complexity of arts and crafts

• Firearms made hunting easier

• Competition for Indian market gave Natives leverage with Europeans

Drawbacks of economic exchange:

• Deskilling

  • Lose the ability to do certain practices

• Overhunting

  • Better than Europeans at using firearms

    • They don’t really hunt anymore

• Dependency on European trade goods

• Competition > intertribal war

• Spread of diseases

Shift from ritual/diplomatic trade pattern (rate items, gifts) to commercial trade pattern (giving one thing for another things, not much spiritual or symbolic meaning)

Diplomatic exchange

• Native-Euroepan alliances

  • Why allies?

    • Trade and military power

• European adoption of “international Native Diplomatic Protocol”

• “Beaver Wars” and intensification of “Mourning Wars”

• Good relations to bad

  • Marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe

• Attempt to solidify relations (diplomatic event)

• Return of Indian messengers from England

  • He gave me nothing (interaction with King James)

  • Miscommunication 

• 1622 massacre

• By law of Nations we can attack back

Native American International diplomatic protocol

the sovereign customs, ceremonies, council procedures, and consensus-driven rules that Indigenous nations used to manage relations, trade, alliances, and conflicts with European powers and the early United States (pasted from AI)

Mourning Wars

Someone in your family was killed, so you pay them back (take captive of enemies as a replacement of the people they lost) because you're mourning

Roanoke

• Colony that got founded and then disappeared 

• People began to die fast, disease was fast and had no cure

• People fleeing

• Sense of panic, breakdown of social norms

Gift-giving

a sacred and central practice used to build kinship, sustain alliances, demonstrate generosity, and establish social or economic reciprocity (pasted from AI)

Virgin soil epidemic

• Pathogens frozen in arctic migration or developed in Asia after migration

• No adaptive immunity from previous exposure

• Limited or absent natural (genetic) resistance, normally developed through natural selection

• Utility of the Virgin Soil thesis

  • There was a 90% depopulation as a result of lack of immunity (not really anyone’s fault) maybe appealing

  • Reasons for the depopulation: Natives were unsophisticated, they couldn’t fight those Europeans, put the blame on native people for their own demise

Adaptive immunity

a specialized branch of the immune system that targets specific foreign invaders, builds immunological memory through T and B cells, and provides long-lasting protection after exposure to an antigen (pasted from AI)

Immunologic determinism

Idea that based on your race/ethnicity you have certain immunity to disadvantages

Treaty of Tordesillas

a 1494 agreement between Spain and Portugal that divided the non-European world along an imaginary meridian to resolve competing colonial claims after Christopher Columbus's voyages (pasted from AI)

Chiefdom

a ranked, centralized political unit where multiple towns or communities are united under the permanent authority of a single hereditary leader, known as a chief or paramount chief (pasted from AI)

Redistributional society

a system of economic and social organization where wealth, food, and resources are brought to a central authority—such as a chief, clan leader, or village council—and then reallocated throughout the community (pasted from AI)

Wampum

• revolution

  • Drew from preexisting Native tradition, European metal technology

Calumet

a long-stemmed, highly decorated ceremonial tobacco pipe used by many Native American tribes (Pasted from AI)

Fictive kinship

a constructed “family” of unrelated individuals who have family-like bonds

“chosen family” idea

Reciprocity

Responsibility

Give and receive

Medieval warm period

a naturally occurring era of warmer and drier conditions that roughly spanned from 950 CE to 1250 CE (or about 800 to 1300 CE depending on the region) (Pasted from AI)

Himdag

New way of life that was more equality and reciprocity based - “a peaceful life”, gift giving, tied to universal law (adopted christianity, adapted to new ways of life while keeping tradition)

Liminal experiences

a transitional state of being "betwixt and between" two distinct stages of life, social roles, or cultural worlds (pasted from AI)

Shaman

a spiritual practitioner who enters altered states of consciousness to act as an intermediary between the physical world and the spirit realm (Pasted from AI)

Reducciones

settlements established by Spanish and Portuguese colonial authorities and Roman Catholic missionaries to forcibly relocate and concentrate indigenous populations in Latin America and the Philippines (pasted from AI)

Catholic vs Protestant approach

Catholic:

emphasized ritual, syncretism, and living among indigenous communities to pursue mass conversion

Protestant:

favored cultural assimilation, literacy in English, and separating or displacing populations to align them with European-style civilization

(Pasted from AI)

Separate creations

Native responses to European religion

• Rejection/cultural relativism

  • You have your ways, we have ours

  • Separate creations of Native people and Europeans (your god made you this way, our god made us this way)

Reasons for Native conversion

• Material

  • Promises of trade good or food

• Cultural

  • Response to cultural breakdown

  • Revival of ancient practices

  • Confluent with cultural patterns (dreams, visions)

• Self or Community Interest

  • Connection to a powerful ally

  • Protection of Native rights, land

• Spiritual

  • Belief

Inclusivist approach

Selective borrowing/syncretism

Civility before conversion paradigm

“They need to be like us before they can accept christianity”

Common descent from Adam

John Eliot

You have to understand and accept it.

Have to abandon their practices