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When Frederick Jackson Turner reimagined American history in 1893, he considered Native Americans to be of little significance. He demonstrated more interest in the process of heroic, white yeomen hewing out a corridor of civilization in an environment that all but overwhelmed them, transforming them from immigrants into Americans. This chapter suggests six broad areas of significance for Native Americans in the history of the 20th-century American West and, by extension, the history of the United States. The first four areas of significance—persistence, land, economic development, and political sovereignty—are overlapping and interdependent. The fifth and sixth areas address larger cultural issues: the persistent symbolic value of native peoples, and the contributions emerging from Native American history and literature.

This chapter discusses the growing interest in Native North American heritage among both Native and non-Native Americans alike. Underlying many Native Americans' renewed interest in their own traditions is their increasing disenchantment with a society that for centuries has been presented as the ultimate model of true civilization. Paralleling the disenchantment of Native Americans is the non-Native Americans' questioning of many of the basic premises of their own civilization. The chapter highlights some problems that can arise when non-Natives attempt to adopt Native American traditions without fully understanding them. It also argues that approaches taken to Native American religious traditions should be rigorous and scholarly in the best Western sense. But, in addition to such reification of the subject, it is also essential to understand these traditions as they are lived by human individuals.

The purpose of this book is to explain how Christianity replaced Native American belief systems in 16th-century America. The use of the confessionario was important in Christian evangelization but coercion, the Devil, and Agriculturalist vs. Hunter-Gatherer societies were major elements in the replacement.

It is a well-known argument that Calvin’s influence, particularly in the New England tradition, is a foundational element of the national literary identity of the United States. A less well-traveled path, however, is the journey Calvin made into the world of the American Indian, a journey most significantly realized in the preaching and literary efforts of the Mohegan missionary, Samson Occom. Throughout his long career as a Presbyterian minister, Occom preached thousands of sermons, both formal and spontaneous, scholarly and simple. This chapter addresses Occom’s use of literary and rhetorical devices in his sermons, focusing particularly on his style, strategies, and cultural message and distinguishes the several "voices" he used in giving utterance to Calvin’s theology among the Native American and frontier populations of North America at the dawn of its national identity.

This chapter focuses on Native Americans' belief about nature. It shows that Native Americans do not dichotomize human and animal, natural and supernatural. Typical Western distinctions between animism and animatism are not necessarily present in the Native American experience, since all forms and aspects of creation are experienced as living and animate. Even “inanimate”rocks are thought to be mysteriously possessed with life. But this experience of the sacred does not exclude a unitary, all-inclusive concept that refers to both a Supreme Being and to all gods, spirits, or powers of creation. The roots of relatedness, Lakota metaphysics, animal beings as teachers, and the cyclical relationships that Native American traditions sustain with nature are discussed.

This chapter focuses on representations of the American Indian in popular styles of Western music from the 18th century to the present. The intention is to show how cultural difference is represented, when little is known or understood about the culture of those being represented, and to consider how shifting perceptions of the Native American can be related to changes in attitude to the “civilized” and the natural world. The emphasis on the popular sharpens the argument, because this kind of representation needs to be widely understood and easily assimilated in order for it to be popular. The ideology embedded in way the American Indian is represented tells us, predictably, about the attitudes of the person who stands outside Native American culture.

This Epilogue sums up the conclusions of the book and puts forward some closiing thoughts. The fundamental lesson that can be learnt from the music of the California padres and their choirs and orchestras, populated by highly trained and impressive Native American artists, is that humble people are capable of astoundingly sophisticated artistry, the final chapter states. There is much we can learn about artistic beauty and the human condition from California mission music.

Although they represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, Native American elders' history and culture lead to distinct opportunities and needs. This chapter examines the status of Native American elders in the United States. Following a brief review of current living conditions, it examines the history of forced assimilation and colonization, and the impact of that history on Native American elders. This is followed by a discussion of service approaches that empower elders and improve their quality of life; and a suggestion that the pursuit of culturally appropriate interventions should begin with the employment of Native American service providers.

This chapter focuses on the unity of experience in Native American religious traditions. Native American traditions stress a unity of experience. Where such traditions are still alive and spiritually viable, the dimension and expression of the sacred is present in all of life's necessary activities. When the elements of time, place, language, art, and the metaphysics of nature come together, however, as they do in ritual activities, the experience of the sacred is intensified. The three cumulative possibilities that must be accomplished by spiritually effective rites: purification, expansion, and identity are mentioned, as are initiation rites, and humor in Native American rites.

This chapter describes how French missionary priests extended the global missionary revival of the nineteenth century to the United States. French missionary priests retained strong connections to Catholics in their homeland and exhibited a reluctance to trust the future of the Catholic Church in the United States to anyone other than European ecclesiastics. A study of the transnational epistolary and literary culture that developed between priests in America and France demonstrates the desired image of life as a missionnaire étrangère among Protestants and Native Americans, an image that only partly matched actual experiences of missionary life but that nonetheless appealed to the imaginations of young men interested in becoming missionaries.

Native American Indians do not embrace or stress the necessity for celibacy because it is not a creative act and represents something more sterile and static, whereas sex is a natural act that is encouraged. The dichotomy between body and soul does not contribute to an emphasis on celibacy because sexuality is conceptualized as a creative power. There are examples of short‐term celibacy among some social groups for mostly religious motives, although cultural figures often give overt expression to sexuality.

This chapter focuses on Native American language and song. It looks at the progressive compromising of tribal languages by the Western world. It discusses the value of oral traditions, the special role of elders in society as keepers of oral tradition, and the art of storytelling.

This chapter presents an overview of the importance of intercultural alliances along the Atlantic seaboard in the period from 1580 to 1660. One of the ways in which Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans created intercultural alliances was by mapping one another. Mapping in the early modern era included significant ethnographic dimensions; such ethnographic mapping was an integral part of the pursuit of intercultural alliances in the early colonial period. Although conflict was a frequent outcome in this period, widespread intercultural accommodation was as important as conflict in shaping the early colonial experience.