ABSTRACT
Many descriptions of Plains Indian life leave the impression that tribal cultures were inward-looking and not widely aware of the large world around them. Certainly, early non-Indian perceptions were of relatively small, mobile, isolated, and often hostile populations with strange languages and customs. Even though several early observers lived and worked closely with Indian groups and witnessed or participated in armed conflicts, intertribal alliances, and treaty talks, there was not widespread or detailed grasp of how Indians dealt with outsiders. Often they have been portrayed as passive or incompetent when responding to outside forces. These images are tinged by the concept called primitivism—the idea that people in small-scale societies exhibit a simple or even naïve way of life, supposedly representative of the way all humans lived in ancient times.
