The Presence of Native American History

This chapter discusses how presence rather than neglect dominates Native American history within the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and Organization of American Historians (OAH) from the earliest years. There have been changes, including a sharp decline in the attention paid to frontier topics, an "explosion of interest" in the field at the annual meetings since 1969, and the rise of new themes, including "zones of contact." The story reflects the democratization process in the OAH and suggests that we have been learning to think about Indian people historically and have come to understand that they are not deficient and, therefore, unimportant or irrelevant to the continent's history and do not need to be supervised and taken care of.