ABSTRACT
Historians, most now armed with the methodology of ethnohistory – an interdisciplinary approach to indigenous history that employs anthropological insights, linguistic evidence, and historical documents – have also begun to look more closely at Indians' cultural adaptability. A more geographically extensive, but equally gloomy view of Indian-white frontier relations appeared in Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute's Contact Points, a collection of essays generated by a 1994 conference. The anthology borrowed Lamar and Thompson's description of frontiers as "contact zones", but its essays on the revolutionary and early-national period described those eras' borderlands as zones of violent dispossession. Whether studying a "middle ground", "borderland", or "contact zone", scholars in the 1990s agreed that the rise of the United States proved very bad news for Native Americans, who experienced racial hatred, increasing violence, loss of land, and loss of power. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, several scholars modified or challenged this view of deteriorating Indian power.
