American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION A great deal has been written about the indigenous peoples of North America before the colonization and conquest by Europeans. In this paper we utilize a theoretical approach that was originally developed to explain developmental differences among countries in the global system to try to understand what had happened in precontact North America. Why take a theory, or more precisely a perspective, originally developed to account for that colonizing effort and apply it to precolonial conditions? There are several reasons, which can be bundled into two groups: those that address explanations of long-term social change in the social sciences and those that address the problem of understanding the colonial encounter, its impacts on Native peoples, and the efforts to curtail those impacts. We begin with the latter because the former are the concern of the bulk of this article.