SYRACUSE, N.Y. – History holds many perspectives, not all which attain prominence or even acceptance. Those who write the ”accepted” or ”official” history of an event or era, for better or worse, shape the memories of the future. In the writing of American history, the oral histories of Indian nations have unfortunately been either ignored or relegated to the sidelines of mythological un-verifiability.

Scholarship on the history of America’s Native peoples, until recent years, has emanated almost exclusively from non-Indian researchers. A pair of 2007 efforts to restore an Indian perspective to history comes from diverse sources – the memoir of a Passamaquoddy tribal elder, and the doctoral thesis of the first Navajo woman to earn a doctorate in the study of history.

‘An Upriver Passamaquoddy,’ by Allen Sockabasin

Allen Sockabasin is a former tribal chief of the Passamaquoddy, whose small reservation lies in far eastern Maine. In ”An Upriver Passamaquoddy,” he writes: ”My hope is that these stories will be used to help our children better understand our tribal history, culture, oral traditions, and hard-work ethic as we struggled and fought for our survival as Passamaquoddy people.”

The author writes of growing up at Mud-doc-mig-goog, also known as Peter Dana Point Village, which juts between Long Lake and Big Lake near Princeton, Maine. The tight-knit nature of the community is readily apparent – not only in the frequency of common surnames, but also in the sharing of holidays, tribal festivals and funerals. Life wasn’t easy, but the people worked hard to support their families and to help each other.

As a child, Sockabasin learned the traditional ways of hunting and fishing from the elders, and built skate-sleds to ride on frozen lakes. He tells of baseball games in which the Passamaquoddy language gave the team a signaling advantage. He listened as elders shared tribal stories and oral history. Throughout, he paints a compelling picture of a small community struggling to survive while surrounded by hostile neighbors.

In the years of Sockabasin’s youth, the 1940s and ’50s, Mud-doc-mig-goog was an isolated place; during the long winters, snow often blocked the only dirt road into town for days at a time until it could be hand-shoveled. Travel was over the frozen lakes.

Indians bore the nasty brunt of racism. They were unwelcome in barber shops, sat apart from whites in the movie theater, couldn’t use public restrooms and were discouraged from attending area high schools. To practice traditional subsistence hunting was to risk the wrath of state game wardens.

”During my childhood,” Sockabasin writes, ”I often overheard our elders claim that the penalty for killing a moose was far greater than what a white man would receive for killing a Passamaquoddy.”

But joyful journeys to neighboring communities of Penobscot, Maliseet, Micmac and Abenaki Indians in Maine, New Brunswick and Quebec, as well as to the nearby Passamaquoddy village of Zee-by-ig, reinforced the Indian identity and strengthened ties to kindred peoples.

The author touches on his tenure as leader of his people, offering his take on tribal politics and relations with the state of Maine. But throughout the book, his overriding concern with preserving the Passamaquoddy language as the spiritual foundation of his people shines through.

”We need to unite and develop language programs that are independent of politics, family feuds and the agendas of non-Native speakers,” Sockabasin writes. ”We need to restore pride in our language and recognize that we are a unique culture with separate, distinct values. We need to bring back and encourage the traditional teachings of our ancestors.”

This poignant memoir reveals much about the most recent century of Passamaquoddy history and how that people has managed to keep its culture alive, and provides a contemporary perspective on Indian life in Maine.

‘Reclaiming Dine’ History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita,’ by Jennifer Nez Denetdale

Where Sockabasin’s conversational style is straight down-home, Jennifer Nez Denetdale takes a more formal, scholarly approach. ”Reclaiming Dine’ History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita” grew out of her dissertation at the University of Northern Arizona. She fuses a probe into her family’s history with a broader examination of how to study and tell Navajo history from the Dine’ perspective.

Denetdale is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Manuelito, one of the last chiefs to resist American incursions into Navajo land, and his wife, Juanita. He plays a prominent role in American historical accounts of the mid- to late 1800s, and was frequently photographed. Juanita, however, was largely overlooked in non-Native histories, though she appeared in a few photos with her husband and others.

Photographs of the Indians of the West, the author points out, were staged and then interpreted to reinforce common stereotypes.

”Very little can be learned about Navajos from photographs,” the author writes. ”What can be learned is how the West privileges photography, how Navajos appear to the West, and how limited these representations are.”

Denetdale argues, ”Failure to interrogate existing documents on women like Juanita undermines attempts to understand the past and present of Navajo women’s lives.”

She interrogates by peeling away layers of cultural bias in non-Native accounts, replacing them with a Dine’ context. Denetdale points out that her great-great-great-grandmother was an accomplished and knowledgeable Navajo woman. Her life spanned two centuries of drastic change for her people – she experienced war and the raids of slave traders, survived the forced exile at Bosque Redondo in the 1860s, traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1874, and felt first-hand the effects of ”civilization” on herself, her family and her people.

Yet, Denetdale says, the photos taken of Juanita by American photographers reduce her to ”a trope – such as a Navajo weaver. Such images of Navajo women continue to define them today.”

The author’s ancestors live on in the memories of their great-grandchildren, Denetdale’s grandparents. Their stories, passed down through generations, remain vitally important to contemporary Navajos.

”Oral traditions placed within a historical framework can offer rich insight into Navajo perspectives on the past, and especially the authoritative roles of women in Navajo society, past and present,” Denetdale writes, adding that historical photographs that are returned to tribes ”have the potential to become sources for renewed storytelling.”

Sockabasin’s memoir and Denetdale’s thesis approach the same goal – reclaiming and retelling Indian history – from widely disparate methodological and geographical directions. Each succeeds in offering the scholar and the casual history buff alike a window into the perspective of contemporary Indian people. Both enrich our knowledge and set the example for similar endeavors in the future.