Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2025
The treatment of North American Indigenous nations as domestic rather than foreign nations is deeply woven into the political-legal fabric of the United States. Even before the United States could exert any real authority in vast regions of Native North America, US officials fancifully defined the independent Indigenous nations whose territories they sought to expropriate as falling under the preeminent sovereignty of the United States. The customary exclusion of US–Indigenous relations from the history of American foreign relations reflected and reinforced this imperial project. Of course, Indigenous nations were, and are, sovereign peoples. This chapter provides a roadmap for those endeavoring to narrate histories that more accurately reflect the nation-to-nation dynamics of US–Indigenous relations. Drawing on the work of Native American and borderlands historians, along with those of Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars more broadly, it offers guidance on how to engage with frameworks such as settler colonialism and methodologies such as ethnohistory to contribute to building a critical and ethical body of work that explicitly frames US–Indigenous relations as international rather than domestic history.
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