Toward a “New Indian History” of Foreign Relations: U.S.-American Indian Diplomacy from Greenville to Wounded Knee, 1795-1890

The Treaty of Greenville and the massacre at Wounded Knee stand as loose bookends for a century in which the United States combined warfare and diplomacy to transform Indian sovereign territories into what is now the continuous United States of America. While older histories of U.S. Indian policy tended to emphasize the effect of government policies on American Indians, over recent decades Native American and borderlands histories have placed Native individuals and polities at the center of historical narratives. Taken together, this scholarship lays an excellent substantive and methodological foundation for a potential new field of diplomatic history that treats nineteenth-century U.S.-American Indian diplomacy as relations between foreign nations forged in an imperial context.