Great Plains Ethnohistory: New Interdisciplinary Approaches

Great Plains Ethnohistory offers a collection of state-of-the-field work in Great Plains ethnohistory, both contemporary and historical, covering the traditional anthropological subfields of ethnography, cultural history, archaeology, and linguistics. As ethnohistory matured into an interdisciplinary endeavor in the 1950s with the formation of the American Society for Ethnohistory, historians and anthropologists developed scholarly methodology for the study of Native American societies from their own points of view. Within this developing framework, Native cultures of the Great Plains represented a foundational research area.

Great Plains Ethnohistory pays intellectual debts to Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks, whose research from the 1970s onward brought ethnohistorical approaches to the study of Native cultures, histories, and languages into the international community of the humanities and social sciences, sciences, and arts. The work of the scholars assembled in this volume advocates for an ethnohistory that continues to decompartmentalize Indigenous knowledge and scholarly methodologies, including some of the constructs, biases, and prejudices perpetuated within traditional scholarly disciplines.

Including essays by Gilles Havard, Joanna Scherer, Sebastian Braun, Brad KuuNUx TeeRIt Kroupa, and DeMallie and Parks themselves, among others, plus an afterword by Philip J. Deloria, this is an essential contribution to the scholarly field and a volume for undergraduate and graduate students and scholars who study Native American and Indigenous cultures.

Rani-Henrik Andersson is an associate professor of North American studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Lakȟóta: an Indigenous History and The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (Nebraska, 2008), among other works. Logan Sutton is a language material developer, researcher, and teacher for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation Culture and Language Department on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, North Dakota. Thierry Veyrié is the director of the Language Program at the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, and editor, with Raymond DeMallie, of Ella Cara Deloria’s The Dakota Way of Life (Nebraska, 2022).