Название: Encyclopedia of United States Indian Policy and Law
Автор: Paul Finkelman, Tim Alan Garrison
Издательство: CQ Press
ISBN: 1933116986
Год: 2008
Формат: PDF
Страниц: 1001
Размер: 30,9 МБ
Язык: Английский

In 1987 ethnohistorian James Axtell published the article “Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections,” in which he imagined a North America bereft of humans at the time of European exploration and settlement.
The purpose of his piece was to demonstrate how vital the Native peoples of the continent had been to the history and development of the United States. Axtell’s imaginative contention could also be extended to an exploration of the relationship between the story of U.S. Indian policy and the general history of the United States.That history is not only important in its own right; it is also interwoven with the political, economic, legal, cultural, and social histories of the United States—which would have developed in other ways.
The United States would be a very different nation today if its government had not had the responsibility of dealing with the tribal nations. Some might see the history of the relations between the United States and American Indians as a long tragedy in which the former subjugated, dispossessed, and annihilated the culture of the latter.