Cultural boundaries exist wherever cultures encounter one another. During centuries of contact between native peoples and others in America, countless intermediaries–artists, students, traders, interpreters, political figures, authors, even performers–have bridged the divide. Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker provides a new understanding of the role of these mediation in North America from 1690 to the present. Cultural brokers have shared certain qualities–in particular a thorough understanding of two of more cultures. Living on the edge of change and conflict, they have responded to evolving and unstable circumstances or alliances with a flexibility born of their determination to bring understanding to disparate peoples. No composite portrait can encompass the complexity of the brokerage experience. To convey the many roles of these intermediaries, editor Margaret Connell Szasz has brought together fourteen distinct portraits, crafted by prominent scholars of Indian-white relations, of brokers across the continent and throughout three centuries of American history–in the colonial world, during the expansion of the republic, in the Wild West, and in the twentieth century. This fascinating and inspiring collection speaks eloquently of life on the cultural frontier. Key figures in our pluralistic heritage, cultural brokers are no less important today, as society continues to struggle with diversity.

In the first book to focus on relations between Indians and emigrants on the overland trails, Michael L. Tate shows that such encounters were far more often characterized by cooperation than by conflict. Having combed hundreds of unpublished sources and Indian oral traditions, Tate finds Indians and Anglo-Americans continuously trading goods and news with each other, and Indians providing various forms of assistance to overlanders. Tate admits that both sides normally followed their own best interests and ethical standards, which sometimes created distrust. But many acts of kindness by emigrants and by Indians can be attributed to simple human compassion. Not until the mid-1850s did Plains tribes begin to see their independence and cultural traditions threatened by the flood of white travelers. As buffalo herds dwindled and more Indians died from diseases brought by emigrants, violent clashes between wagon trains and Indians became more frequent, and the first Anglo-Indian wars erupted on the plains. Yet, even in the 1860s, Tate finds, friendly encounters were still the rule. Despite thousands of mutually beneficial exchanges between whites and Indians between 1840 and 1870, the image of Plains Indians as the overland pioneers’ worst enemies prevailed in American popular culture. In explaining the persistence of that stereotype, Tate seeks to dispel one of the West’s oldest cultural misunderstandings.

In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact on the historical development of the United States. Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as determinants of American—rather than specifically Native American—literature. The notion that the presence of Indian peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored. In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin probes the complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination. Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, William Apess' A Son of the Forest, and little known works such as colonial Indian conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that Walden addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and whites; that William Bartram's Travels encodes competing and interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the nation. The Demon of the Continent proves Indians to be actors in the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and interchange.

As Sweet focuses on negotiations between James Oglethorpe, the English leader, and Tomochichi, the Lower Creek representative, over issues of trade, land, and military support, she also looks at other individuals and groups who played a role in British-Creek interactions during this period: British traders; missionaries, including John Wesley and George Whitefield; the Salzburgers of Ebenezer; interpreters such as Mary Musgrove; the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees; British colonists from South Carolina; and Spanish and French forces who vied with the Georgia settlers for land, trading rights, and Indian support.

During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America. Indians in the Family shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building. As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy. U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of this country, in fact Early America already existed long before the arrival of the Europeans. From coast to coast, Native Americans had created enduring cultures, and the subsequent European invasion remade much of the existing land and culture. In New Worlds for All, Colin Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America. The journey toward this hybrid society kept Europeans' and Indians' lives tightly entwined: living, working, worshiping, traveling, and trading together—as well as fearing, avoiding, despising, and killing one another. In the West, settlers lived in Indian towns, eating Indian food. In Mohawk Valley, New York, Europeans tattooed their faces; Indians drank tea. And, a unique American identity emerged.

Details the impact of World War II on American Indian life, arguing that the war had a more profound and lasting effect on the course of Indian affairs in the twentieth century than any other single event or period, and assessing its consequences for American Indians and whites.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated economically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigenous peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was "Indian" and how "Indians" behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of "Indian" was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

The world of contemporary American infants and young children is saturated with inappropriate images of American Indians. American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children reveals and discusses these images and cultural stereotypes through writings like Kathy Kerner's previously unpublished essay on Thanksgiving and an essay by Dr. Cornell Pewewardy on Disney's Pocahontas film. This edition incorporates new writings and recent developments, such as a chronology documenting changes associated with the mascot issue, along with information on state legislation. Other new material incorporates powerful commentary by Native American veterans, who speak to the issue of stereotyping against their people in the military. Also includes a new expanded annotated bibliography.