American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The writer of Native American history faces many vexing problems: the lack of aboriginal documentary or published sources; the reliance on subjective, oral Indian testimony; the need for internal tribal histories; and the investigation of non-Western aboriginal cultures, which is refractory to the methods and concepts of the modern social scientist. Among the problems of writing Indian history is the lack of communication between historian and anthropologist. Although ethnohistory developed as a separate entity in the 1950s, history and anthropology have not successfully merged. As Reginald Horsman has pointed out, the two have divergent interests in the writing of Native American history. These divergent interests involve different methodologies and emphases. Historians write about (recent) Anglo-Indian contacts and federal Indian policy; anthropologists write of precontact existence. Historians approach native biography from the printed sources, anthropologists from the oral testimony of informants. History does not use, or rarely uses, the primary method of research of anthropology-fieldwork. Historians view the aboriginal cultures from afar, the anthropologist from within the hogan. The historian writes narrative prose, free of jargon; the anthropologist writes highly technical, deductive analyses that sometimes are hard for his fellow anthropologists to understand.