“The Last of the Mohicans”: Cases of Extinction of Indigenous Peoples in North America

Abstract

The problem of “extinction” of peoples still requires further theorizing. The most committed proponents of the constructivist approach tend to reduce it to the deconstruction of their own idea of the “myth of extinction”. Studying North American cases of the vanishing of pre-colonial ethnic-political units, as well as the subsequent renaissance of those as new reservation communities under certain conditions (e.g., the cases of Pamunkey and Mattaponi, Virginia) can significantly enrich the view of the issue that has been established in Russian ethnographic scholarship. The facts examined bring us to the need for such integrated theory that would combine a critique of the “extinction” discourse together with a parallel explication of the real historical process behind it.