The Significance of the Indian in American History

Over the past two decades, a number of scholars, many of them Native Americans, have published works drawing attention to the significance of the American Indian in American history. They suggest, first, that Indians played a significant role in shaping what is today the United States by, second, contributing uniquely American components to the national experience. Anecdotal and narrative accounts of American Indians have appeared since Columbus’s first landfall. Western, or frontier, historians have talked about the ”Indian Barrier” to Anglo-American expansion. But rarely were Natives credited with playing a formative role in the making of the nation. As scattered residents of an “empty continent,” they could be ignored as irrelevant to the mainstream of American history. This essay endeavours to explore the evidence and interpretations which urge us to consider how Native Americans helped shape America.\nMany of this nation‘s finest thinkers have tried to understand and explain what it means to be an American. The quest for national identity and definition surfaced two centuries ago and still continues, revealing a certain restlessness, a rootlessness which seems to haunt the nation. In 1980, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder highlighted “one of the key problems in American society now” as “people’s lack of commitment to any given place.” Like foster children, periodically moving from place to place, living in houses but aching for a home, immigrant peoples have lived on and ranged about a continent without sinking roots. What is needed, Snyder asserts, is ”not even a rediscovery but a discovery of North America. . . . People live on it without knowing what it is or where they are. They live on it literally like invaders.” So they wonder where they fit, who they are.