Encyclopedia of United States Indian Policy and Law (repost)

In 1987 ethnohistorian James Axtell published the article “Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections,” in which he imagined a North America bereft of humans at the time of European exploration and settlement. The purpose of his piece was to demonstrate how vital the Native peoples of the continent had been to the history and development of the United States. Axtell’s imaginative contention could also be extended to an exploration of the relationship between the story of U.S. Indian policy and the general history of the United States.That history is not only important in its own right; it is also interwoven with the political, economic, legal, cultural, and social histories of the United States—which would have developed in other ways.