American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Tribal History-An Obsolete Paradigm James A. Clifton Because it is one of the better-perhaps the best recent example-of the genre, Edmund J. Danziger's newly published The Chippewas of Lake Superior can serve as a point of departure for an assessment of that peculiarly American historiographic form known as the tribal history. In this slim volume, as we will see, Danziger pushes to their utmost limits the basic assumptions, methods, and rationalizations of this traditional approach to the scholarly task of unraveling the sense and patterns of the past of Native American societies. In so doing he clearly revealed the fundamental limitations and defects of the model adopted to structure this inquiry. These striking weaknesses, it must be emphasized, are deficiencies of what Thomas B. Kuhn calls a "normal paradigm," not the person. They express the failure of the long established customary set of ideas, restrictions, presuppositions, and techniques that mark the tribal history as a distinctive genre now grown obsolete. Hence these comments must be read as a critique of the tribal history paradigm, not of any particular author who is intellectually trapped by its form and style. As Kuhn observes in his study of the evolution of science and scholarship, the historical development of a branch of disciplined knowledge is more a thing of fits and starts than a continuously steady accumulation of demonstrated facts and tested propositions. Such development, he argues cogently, proceeds by sequential phases of normal and revolutionary science. The normal phase of scholarship-of which the tribal history is but one long established variety-is built upon a basic underlying paradigm that structures and restricts the efforts of scholars in the discipline.