Primary sources: Indian goods and the history of american colonialism and the 19th-century reservation

Throughout the last half of the 19th century, American Indian tribes throughout the Great Plains signed treaties and moved onto reservations carved out of traditional Native homelands. Through their scholarship, historians and anthropologists alike have made reservation boundaries synonymous with a now standard break in the periodization of American Indian studies.1 For historians, the time before reservation boundaries involved a great struggle between westward expansion and tribal retention of political autonomy and homelands.2 Anthropologists write of the time before reservations as one of cultures untainted by the radical changes imposed on tribes during the reservation period. Following reservation treaties Native history becomes one of economic, political, and cultural decline in the wake of individual tribal struggles and failures to stop the American advance across the Plains (Mooney 1979:ix-x, 218).