American Indian Geography

Contemporary geographical research concerning North America’s native peoples is most conspicuous for its remarkably diverse set of subjects, methods, and epistemological stances. Indeed, it would be hard to find another AAG specialty group whose members do research in as many corners of the natural and social sciences and humanities. Some perspectives developed quite recently, while others emanate from a century of prior research by geographers, especially Carl Sauer and his students. We think these observations important enough to require opening our review with a description, albeit a painfully brief one, of the historical context for the current scene. In the early twentieth century, as now, there was a great deal of cross-fertilization between anthropology and geography. Deterministic thinking associated with environmentalist theory (e.g. Hans 1925; Huntington 1919; Semple 1903) elicited many critical responses from both fields. For example, the geographer-turned-anthropologist Franz Boas and his students sought to illuminate the full complexity of Native American life, producing a vast corpus of empirical studies. Many addressed geographical topics, including Native North American place-names, environmental knowledge, and resource use. These works were frequently termed “ethnogeographies” (e.g. Barrett 1908; Boas 1934; Harrington 1916). Others attempted sweeping continental studies of regional variation based on historical and cultural processes (Kroeber 1939; Wissler 1926). The historicist critique of environmentalist theory resonated with a young geographer, Carl Sauer. Sauer (1920) long had interests in American Indian land-use practices, or “land management” in current parlance. Regular interaction with Boas’s students, especially Kroeber and Lowie, coupled with independent development of their own geographical ideas, led Sauer and his students to expand their research on North American Indian cultural geography, including such subjects as settlement patterns (e.g. Sauer and Brand 1930), plant use (e.g. Carter 1945), and resources and material and oral culture (e.g. Kniffen 1939). Sauer, his large number of Ph.D. students, and his student’s students, continued to define this research agenda throughout the twentieth century (e.g. Kniffen et al. 1987; Sauer 1971). The continued relevance of this work was signaled recently by the reissue of two classic texts in new editions (Denevan 1992a; Waterman 1993).