The American Indian Quarterly

During the middle 1970s, when I began my doctoral studies, American Intellectual History at the University of Washington annexed Native American Studies under the heading: "History of the Westward Movement," a connotatively loaded phrase that seemed to assume that the influence of artifact and intellect moved in one direction—east to west, from European-Americans to Native Americans. Some days I felt as if I had been summoned to class in General Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School—eyes front, keep your hair short, speak English.

At the same time I was studying intercultural communication, which taught me two basic lessons: first, everything evolves from something else, and, second, everyone, upon contact, influences everyone else. Thus the U.S. Constitution was not a product of spontaneous intellectual combustion in Philadelphia during the torrid summer of 1787. As Native friends suggested that I study the effects of the Iroquois on the thoughts of Benjamin Franklin, I was reading Felix Cohen's essay "Americanizing the White Man," which described how Cohen believed Native polities had helped shape our own.¹ Cohen, author of the Handbook of Federal Indian Law, still a basic legal reference, compared Native American influence on immigrants from Europe to the ways in which the Greeks shaped Roman culture:

When the Roman legions conquered Greece, Roman historians wrote with as little imagination as did the European historians who have written of the white [End Page 667] man's conquest of America. What the Roman historians did not see was that captive Greece would take captive conquering Rome [with] Greek science [and] Greek philosophy.²

Cohen wrote that American historians had too often paid attention to military victories and changing land boundaries while failing to see that "in agriculture, in government, in sport, in education, and in our views of nature and our fellow men, it is the first Americans who have taken captive their battlefield conquerors." American historians "have seen America only as an imitation of Europe," Cohen asserted. In his view "The real epic of America is the yet unfinished story of the Americanization of the white man"³

Cohen published his essay in 1952. Even so, the idea that Native Americans left an important impression on our political ideas was off the cognitive maps of most scholars under whose aegis I passed during the 1970s. The idea was not invented by a new generation of scholars in our time, however. It was being rediscovered. Such an undercurrent always had existed, as evidenced by a letter that the poet Walt Whitman wrote to the Santa Fe City Council in 1883, four years after General Pratt started his Carlisle School under the slogan "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" (for example, "assimilate or die").

As to our aboriginal or Indian population.... I know it seems to be agreed that they must gradually dwindle as time rolls on, and in a few generations more leave only a reminiscence, a blank. But I am not at all clear about that. As America develops, adapts, entwines, faithfully identifies its own—are we to see it cheerfully accepting... all the contributions of foreign lands from the whole outside globe—and then rejecting the only ones distinctly its own?⁴

Now comes an entire encyclopedia devoted to this idea, evidence that the idea of two-way communication has reached a degree of maturity in the academy. In so doing, such ideas have brought us a long way from the boarding school days of forced one-way acculturation.

As its title suggests, Keoke and Porterfield's Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World is the first attempt to compile a wide array of such material and intellectual aspects under one cover. It is a wide-ranging effort, and...