For more than a century, American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis”—which posits that the settlement and colonization of the rugged Western frontier proved the decisive factor in forming the culture of American democracy—was uniquely central to understanding American history.
Yet Native peoples viewed the expansion far differently from “winning the West” and “taming the wildness.”
To better understand how Native peoples perceived this transformational time frame in American history and its historical associations, Raymond Orr, director of the Native American and Global Indigenous Studies (NAGIS) project, the Elizabeth B. White Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science in the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, turned to artificial intelligence.
“When asking whether Native Americans write or express themselves differently, we would probably say that they do, basing our answer on largely qualitative information,” said Orr, himself an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a federally recognized tribe in Oklahoma.
“With the use of AI and working with data scientists—a novel approach in terms of Native peoples research—we’ve been able to contribute a quantitative response to the question of expression,” Orr added.
For “Native-authored works in the HathiTrust Digital Library,” a project conducted in collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center and with generous support from the Mellon Foundation, Orr and fellow researchers Kun Lu and Raina Heaton at the University of Oklahoma, Ryan Dubnicek at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Isabella Magni at the University of Sheffield reviewed more than 700 authors’ works.
The researchers created two databases of the works of Native authors and non-Native authors to assess linguistic choices relating to “the frontier” and associative subjects and captured within a 200-year window of time.
“This computer-verified analysis acknowledges that authors write about American history differently. Many people can tell you that and you can believe it, but how widespread is it? Our study helps to establish that,” Orr said.
Native authors, for example, employed terms related to nature, colonization, and geography that have different implications for Native and non-Native peoples.
In reference to the term “frontier,” Native authors often quote or distance themselves from it, reflecting a viewpoint that expresses a point of loss rather than a central American character-building event, according to Orr.
The frontier has been described as the central event or process in creating the American character and driving major sociological and economic change—free and open land, the growth of a middle class, migration from the East and away from urban centers—and generated all kinds of literature related to it, he noted.
“You could assume that Native Americans would think about it differently, and we did find significant differences both qualitatively and quantitatively,” he said.
The researchers used a sentiment analysis—positive or negative associations—encapsulated within a five- to seven-word proxy or perimeter around the term, such as “the dangerous frontier” (negative) or “fortune was made on the frontier” (positive).
“We do want to know how people write differently and express themselves differently, and the study tells us about social change perhaps even more than about ethnic or cultural differences,” Orr added.
In terms of which authors qualify as Native vis-à-vis non-Native, Orr admitted the distinction was imperfect. Native peoples who were federally recognized on both sides of the border between U.S. and Canada were included.
Orr, who joined the University in 2023 after teaching stints in Oklahoma and Australia, brings a long history of exploring the political worlds of Native peoples to his role as NAGIS director.
“What we’re trying to do is highlight the ways in which Native peoples have made contributions and often have done so without recognition and under difficult circumstances,” Orr said.
