Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

January 14, 1999

Plains Folk: The Need to Know Plains Indians from Afield

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

One aspect of the heritage of the Great Plains that reveals our parochialism is our knowledge of Plains Indians. People in any quarter of the plains define Plains Indians according to what they know of peoples nearby. In the Dakotas people think of Lakota, in Alberta they think of Blackfeet, in Kansas they think of Cheyenne and in Texas they think of Comanche.

If you read Great Plains historian Walter P. Webb, then you get the Texas experience writ large. Comanche were the people Anglo Texans loved to hate, and so Webb dwells largely on them. As he saw it, the defining event in Plains Indian cultural history was the acquisition of the horse from the Spanish. On the other hand, from Canadian prairie historian Gerald Friesen you learn it was not so much the horse as firearms and the fur trade that made the natives of the northern plains into what whites defined as Plains Indians.

That's why I welcome a new book by Paul H. Carlson, "The Plains Indians," published by Texas A & M University Press. Carlson, a professor of history at Texas Tech, comes closer than any previous writer to telling the full story in a package accessible to the general reader.

The full story in the sense of writing about Indians as whole people. Carlson has the predictable chapters on horse and bison culture and on warfare, but he also has evenhanded chapters devoted to social conventions, belief systems, and trade and diplomacy. This is good work because it recognizes those things that are distinctive to particular groups, but also identifies those things that are common enough to be designated Plains Indian culture.

Carlson's emphasis in time is on the so-called golden age of Plains Indian culture in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Reservation life in the late 1800s and in the 20th century are treated in short chapters at the end.

Plains Indian culture, as Carlson defines it, came into being after contact with things European--horses, firearms, goods, trade and politics. He does not treat Indians as passive or victims. He emphasizes, however, the "ephemeral" nature of Plains Indian culture and the necessity of change and adaptation, even after confinement on reservations.

Carlson has done us a great service, but there is more to be done in order to make the Plains Indian experience a useful history for Indian and white alike. First, we need histories that begin far in the past and continue evenhandedly to present day, so that we see our connection to the story. To deal with Plains Indians as characters in the distant past misses the most important part of the story for us today. How has it come to be that Plains Indian people, placed on reservations against their will, have developed a "rootedness" most of us cannot fathom? There is a powerful sense of place on the "rez" that the rest of us need to know about. Second, we need to recognize that hunting was not the only way for Plains Indians to make a living and a life. The Mandan, Hidatsa, Arickara, Wichita and other village farming peoples of the plains were expert farmers and savvy tradespeople. Carlson does better than most historians at writing them into the story, but they fade away late in his account.

Finally, we might re-think what we wish to admire and emulate in Plains Indian society. As described by Carlson, Plains Indians turned away from diversified subsistence and embraced a one-commodity economy. In doing so they fashioned a society where men were the dominant breadwinners and women played mere supporting roles. As the world economy impinged on their society, their way of life perished. Does any of this sound familiar?

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136