Author(s): | Johansen, Bruce E. |
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Reviewer(s): | Wishart, David M. |
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Bruce E. Johansen, editor, The Encyclopedia of Native American Economic
History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. xvii + 301 pp. $85, ISBN:
0-313-3062300.
Reviewed for EH.NET by David M. Wishart, Department of Economics,
Wittenberg University.
Compiling any sort
of volume on Native Americans with “Encyclopedia” in the title is a daunting
task given the diversity of Native American cultures and experiences. Johansen
is the Robert T. Reilly Professor of Communication and Native American Studies
at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and would seem to be a good choice for
editing a work such as this one. He has written extensively about topics
related to Native Americans over the last two decades including five books
(three co-authored), one of them titled The Encyclopedia of Native American
Biography (New York:
Henry Holt, 1997). Contributors to The Encyclopedia of Native American
Economic History include Donald Grinde, Jr., Fred Leroy, Barbara A. Mann,
Jerry Stubben, and Michael Tate. Grinde, Mann, and Tate a re historians,
Stubben is a professor of political science, and Leroy is chairman of the Ponca
Tribe of Nebraska. Unfortunately, there are no economists among the
contributors and it shows in the product. If good economic history consists of
a combination
of history and economic theory on every page, as McCloskey has suggested, then
this book falls short of the mark by quite a distance.
The absence of any attempt at an analytical treatment of the economic history
of Native Americans is glaring. One could
convincingly argue that the title of the book should be simply The
Encyclopedia of Native American History. The history that is presented is
as much social, political,
military, environmental, demographic, and epidemiological as it is economic.
Certainly, the types of history covered in this volume represent important
lines of inquiry for students of Native American history and economic history.
But a proper synthesis of economic theory, quantitative analysis, and Native
American history remains to be presented.
Johansen’s volume begins
with the all-too-short entry (four pages) “Agriculture, Native American” and
continues through the alphabet with just
under two hundred entries contained in 300 pages including a bibliography and
index. Each entry is followed by a list of several references. This approach
could work. However, with few exceptions, the entries are too short to offer
anything but a cursory introduction to the topic discussed.
In many cases, important works are left out of the list of references. For
example, R. Douglas Hurt’s excellent book, Indian Agriculture in America:
Prehistory to Present (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1987), is
absent from the first entry on agriculture. Theda Perdue’s work, Slavery and
the Evolution of Cherokee Society: 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1979), is missing for the Cherokee economy entry. The Slavery
and Native Americans entry contains no reference to the enslavement of African
Americans by Native Americans in the southeastern United States,
surely an important issue in the economic history of Native Americans. No
mention is made of Mary Young’s classic volume, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and
Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830-1860 (Norman,
OK:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), in the history of land allotments to
Native Americans that is presented.
These criticisms aside, some of the entries are quite good. For example,
the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) economy receives more detailed treatment over 15
pages and comes the closest of any of the entries in the book to representing
an analytical approach to Native American economic history. The entry stresses
gendered production in its explanation of Iroquois women’s
agriculture and men’s forest husbandry. The view presented is that gendered
production should not be interpreted as stemming from male domination, but
rather from a theory of cosmic balance, the “principle of the Twins,” that
undergirds Iroquois institutions. This essay is especially engaging because it
provides an explanation of Native American economic behavior in the context of
Native American institutions. Judging from contemporary reports, the Iroquois
institutions were highly successful at organizing the production of substantial
surpluses of food to support prosperous and powerful communities.
The gambling entry provides considerable information on an important
contemporary economic topic in Native American society. With the exception of
the Akwesasne Mohawks of St. Regis in Upstate New York, where violence erupted
between supporters and opponents of gambling, the portrayal of gambling
operations on Native American reservations is largely positive.
Communities previously mired in poverty have seen astounding increases in their
incomes as a result of casino gambling. The operations are typically
associated with significant expansion of employment opportunities.
Despite the wide diversity of experience among Native American people,
commonality exists, so there is, understandably,
considerable overlap in the topics discussed in many of the entries. For
example, all communities had first contact experiences with whites. Typically,
these first contacts involved trade, which for an economic historian, sets the
stage for consideration
of attitudes toward exchange among Native Americans and Europeans. Exchange
was usually followed by the introduction of disease to Native Americans and
warfare between Native American and European communities, again setting up an
opportunity for an economic historian to consider the impact of huge losses of
human capital and land on Native Americans. Succumbing to the depredations of
disease and warfare, most Native Americans have more recently accepted removal
to reservation lands followed by attempts at rebuilding their cultures often
with the involvement of the federal government. Here, the challenge for
economic historians is to describe the political economy of interaction between
Native Americans and the federal government.
Rather than attempt to
present an introduction to Native American economic history via an
encyclopedia, it may be more fruitful to pursue an approach that emphasizes
these common experiences. A fuller, more coherent presentation of Native
American economic institutions and their performance prior to and after
contact with Europeans would be possible with the discussion arranged around
economic processes such as exchange, gains and losses of human and physical
capital, and the political economy of relations between Native Americans and
the federal government.
While Johansen’s volume fails to fully satisfy the need for an economic history
of Native Americans, it does bring together a wide array of accounts and
sources that will no doubt be a part of future work in the field. In
doing so, this book will prove useful to many students of Native American
economic history.
David M. Wishart Department of Economics Wittenberg University
Wishart is currently at work on a paper that compares Cherokee and white
agriculture during the antebellum period in Georgia and Alabama. His article,
“Could the Cherokee Have Survived in the Southeast?” appears in
The Other Side of the Frontier: Economic Explorations into Native American
History, edited by Linda Barrington (Boulder, CO: Westview P ress, 1999).
David M. Wishart should not be confused with David J. Wishart, who also writes
on topics related to Native American history.
Subject(s): | Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender |
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Geographic Area(s): | North America |
Time Period(s): | General or Comparative |