American Indian Culture and Research Journal

If have to, I can look back and see where I came from and not to be proud, but to be confident, because that provided me the stepping stone to where I am going to. But yet, I don’t know where I am going to. And it's good because I have the confidence to know that when I get there, I know that I still have somewhere to go. That way I never rest. -Stan Rice, Jr. president of the board of directors, Yavapai Prescott Indian Tribe The degree to which any Native American group has remained “culturally intact,” in other words, has retained a Native American identity, has most often been measured by the group’s ability to cling to Native traditions in a modern world. Cultural change is usually interpreted as an assimilationist move. However, all cultures undergo constant changes as they adjust to new living conditions and attempt to keep cultural identity intact and successfully function in changing environments. This is especially true in the United States, where Native societies, more often than not, were on the receiving end of European and American policies of conquest. Here in particular, culture- the blueprints for everyday behavior-reveals its flexible nature. Culture is always in flux, accommodating identity with the ever-changing external reality. Ethnohistory can be credited for promoting these aspects of cultural change over time into the rewriting of Native American history. Older studies were generally concerned with entire regions or large North American tribal units. Until recently, few ethnohistorians studied smaller Native American groups, especially those in the American Southwest; even today, traditional historiographic approaches continue to dominate the research concerning these groups. The majority of these studies emphasize the confrontational aspects of Euro-American/Indian history and focus on the Indian frontier. Yet many smaller tribes did not vanish with the end of this frontier. They weathered the changes wrought by colonialism and continue to exist today.