Percentage of Population Over Ten Illiterate, 1900–1930
Class 1900 1910 1920 1930
All classes 10.7 7.7 6.0 4.3 Indian 56.2 45.3 34.9 25.7 White 6.2 5.0 4.0 3.0
Native 4.6 3.0 2.0 1.6 Foreign-born 12.9 12.7 13.1 10.8
Negro 44.5 30.4 22.9 16.3 All others 26.6 13.1 14.5 12.3
Source: Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming, by Leonard A. Carlson. Data from The Indian Population of the United States and Alaska, 1930, p. 143.
C O N C L U S I O N
The sources in this chapter demonstrate that historians’ primary material is often biased, reflecting not only objective conditions but also what people thought about them. The sources also make clear that these biases and views are as important as historical facts. In this case, historians can learn a great
Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial Review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Chapter 3 Evaluating Primary Sources76
deal about white–Indian relations because their sources reflect the beliefs and perceptions of both Indian reformers and Native Americans.
Historians whose primary sources reflect only a narrow range of views risk writing history biased by unrepresentative sources. As we saw in Chapter 1, our conclusions about Reconstruction changed dramatically as historians consid- ered the views of people other than white, male Redeemers. Likewise, who to- day would think that the writings of big business defenders like William Graham Sumner presented an accurate or complete view of industrial growth’s impact on American workers? So, too, the writings of white Indian reformers might well tell us much more about the reformers than the people they sought to change.
Similarly, historians’ writings—called secondary sources—contain different views of the past, even when they rely on the same primary sources. Thus, histo- rians’ debates often hinge less on matters of fact than on their own assumptions and values. Early twentieth-century historians holding the dominant racial views of that day, for instance, might well consider the sources in this chapter and reach conclusions about Indian reform similar to those held by the white reform- ers, themselves. By shaping the questions that they ask, historians’ assumptions and values often determine the facts they choose to emphasize. Remembering that will make it easier in the following chapters to evaluate both primary and secondary sources and to use one kind of historical source to appraise the other.
F U R T H E R R E A D I N G
David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995).
Susan Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People’s History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
Arnold Krupat, ed., Native American Autobiography: An Anthology (Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin Press, 1994).
Janet A. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1983).
N O T E S
1. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1881), p. 339.
2. Quoted in Evan M. Maurer et al., Visions of the People: A Pictorial History of Plains Indian Life (Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1992), p. 284.
Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial Review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.