Tragic Encounter: The People's History of Native Americans - Hardcover

Smith, Page

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9781445654027: Tragic Encounter: The People's History of Native Americans

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1445654024 ISBN 13: 9781445654027

Publisher: Amberley, 2016

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Page Smith was one of America’s greatest historians. After studying with Samuel Eliot Morison at Harvard, Smith went on to a distinguished academic career that culminated with him being the founding Provost of Cowell College, the first college of the new campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. But he made his mark with a history of the United States published in eight volumes, each volume carrying the subtitle A People’s History of the United States. These were groundbreaking histories, composed as a long continuous narrative loosely organized around the themes present in each age or period. There were sourced almost entirely in contemporaneous accounts of the events covered, and they set the ground for a whole new approach to history.

During the last years of his life, Smith concentrated on composing a history of Native Americans after the first European contact. This manuscript was discovered unpublished after his death. Using his wonderful technique of narrative, discovering in the events of each period the thematic overview of that period, he again turns to contemporaneous documents to provide the structure and substance of his story. From Jamestown to Wounded Knee, the story of these Native peoples from coast to coast is explored, granting these oppressed and nearly destroyed people a chance to tell their own broad story.

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About the Author:

Charles Page Smith (best known by his middle name) was a United States historian, author, professor and community activist. A veteran of the Second World War, he was awarded a Purple Heart for his service. He wrote more than twenty books, including the eight-volume series A People's History of the United States and John Adams, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1963 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. As a professor, he taught at UCLA and later was the founding provost of Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As an activist, he was a lifelong advocate for the homeless, community organisation and improving the prison system. Page Smith died in August 1995, one day after the death of his beloved wife, Eloise.

In a striking, and to me somewhat mysterious manner, those aboriginal or tribal people, whom we have chosen, rather misleadingly, to call Indians, have emerged in the last two decades from the obscurity into which they fell at the end of the Indian Wars, circa 1880, to become once more a major preoccupation of white Americans. Their champions have claimed a new name for them, Native Americans, on the grounds that they were here long before the white man invaded their” continent. The white invaders are now often called Euro-Americans, presumably to emphasize that they (we) were the intruders and conquerors of the original, real Americans. Seen in this light, the latecomers appear as false claimants, bogus Americans.

The reasons for the sudden prominence of Indians are undoubtedly related in part to a re-awakened environmental ethic,” to admonitions to love and preserve the land. The Indians, we are told, are a model for us. They had an intimate relationship to the natural world that we should try to emulate. Contributing to the elevation of the Indian is, doubtless, a kind of modern primitivism, a weariness with a world of technological wonders; a desire to return to a womb of innocence, to recapture the instinctual life of the natural” man and woman.

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