Kansas Department of Health and Environment
Question
Asked 14 November 2013
Have there been any attempts at an atlas of native american history focused on sociology versus conflict?
For my first year seminar, I have been teaching out of Joel Spring's Deculturalization text, one chapter of which gives a summary of the educational methods used by White Americans to pacify and "deculturalize" the various indigenous peoples. One of my lectures attempted to match each of the phases of these educational "crusades" with the overall geography of the time, namely, where the Native American tribes were currently located at the time of each educational movement. There is a fairly clear correlation, e.g., the Indian Boarding School Movement began precisely when the Eastern tribes have been effectively eliminated or exiled to Oklahoma and the only barrier to easy transport to the West Coast were the Lakota and Sioux et al.
Unfortunately, I had to piece together the actual geographical location of many of the Native American tribes during the different eras from many different sources, since there does not seem to exist an atlas that simply shows the year-by-year geographic domains -- at least, during the years between the various Indian Wars.