mer rooted in Columbus's misunderstanding of geography. As noted above, many Indians left no historical evidence of the conventional documentary sort -- no narratives, no accounts of their people's pasts with exact names and dates, no treatises on their governance, agriculture, economy, or religion. How then do we tell their stories and understand them for themselves? Second, for the most part, we have left the study of Indians to anthropologists and ethnologists. This is not to denigrate their work -- but, when we avail ourselves of it, we risk being caught in a painful bind. The implicit message of much of the older work of this type, of many "eyewitness" accounts of the period from 1492 through 1890, and even of the idea that a people can be studied usefully only through scholarly disciplines usually applied to "primitive" peoples, is that Indians are somehow inferior to European. The corollary to this message is that, as "primitive" peoples, the Indians either "deserved" conquest by the Europeans, or needed to be "civilized" by the Europeans, or both. To guard against this tendency, we should recall the warning of Claude Levi-Strauss, quoted by Alvin Josephy at the beginning of his classic book The Indian Heritage of America: A PRIMITIVE PEOPLE IS NOT A BACKWARD OR RETARDED PEOPLE; INDEED IT MAY POSSESS A GENIUS FOR INVENTION OR ACTION THAT LEAVES THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF CIVILIZED PEOPLES FAR BEHIND. While it is tempting to lump the Indians together as one people, and while most students may come into the class with that way of thinking firmly in place, we have to make certain that we recognize the extraordinary spectrum of diverse peoples, cultures, languages, customs, traditions, economies, and forms of society and government that compose the history of the Indian peoples of the Americas. As many significant differences -- in geographical location, language, politics, economics, religion, and cult culture -- distinguish the Mohawk fro...
