Pragmatism is America’s most distinctive philosophy. In the received history, it has been understood as a development of European thought in response to the "American wilderness." A closer examination, however, reveals that the roots and central commitments of pragmatism are grounded in ways of thinking indigenous to North America. It is the purpose of Native Pragmatism to recover this history and in so doing provide the means to reconceive the scope and potential of American philosophy. Pragmatism has been at best only partially understood by those who focus on its European antecedents. The recovery of the history of pragmatism I develop throws new light on its complex origins and demands not only a rethinking of pragmatism, but also a rethinking of the sources and roles of African American and feminist thought in the development of the American philosophical tradition. It requires paying attention to the idea that pragmatism and its development involved the work of a wide range of thinkers who have been overlooked in the history of philosophy. It also requires seeing the ways in which pragmatism developed in part as a philosophy of resistance against a dominant way of thinking imported from Europe and in part as a philosophy of pluralism working to sustain a diverse American community. This recovery is also timely. North America in the 21st century will be an increasingly diverse place. Long established principles of equality and national unity will be disrupted by the demands of difference. Any adequate response to this pluralist environment will require change in established ways of thinking. It will call up, in fact, a philosophical crisis, whether or not it is so named, in which options will be narrow. People can ignore difference, suppress it with escalating violence, or they can search for other principles, alternative ways of understanding and acting in the world, that will promote coexistence. The problem is not a new one, and despite a history of failure from the dominant point of view, there is already a philosophical perspective within the American tradition that offers an alternative. Instead of a violent response to cultural pluralism, it provides a logic that helps to diffuse conflict while fostering both difference and connections. This recovery of the history of pragmatism will contribute to the larger issue by recovering a way of thinking already committed to pluralism and the coexistence of different modes of knowing, different values, and different practices. I argue that the "classical" pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, is a way of thinking embedded in a much broader tradition whose origins are found in Native American philosophy, in particular in the philosophical perspective of the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples of the north and northeast. To demonstrate this point, I trace the central ideas of pragmatism from their origin in Native American philosophy, through their influence along the shifting borders between Native and European America, through their influence on the Black nationalist and feminist movements of the 19th century, to their emergence in the work of the classical pragmatists. While no other history of American philosophy develops the connections I present, there is nevertheless substantial evidence that the central commitments of pragmatism emerged first in Native American philosophy and then again and again along the borders within North America where cultural differences were contested and their coexistence sought. In the first two chapters, I develop the need for a new history of American philosophy, a methodology for this reconstruction, and set out the principles that form a shared starting place for classical pragmatism. Although histories of American philosophy have uniformly left out any consideration of the possibility of Native American influence and have paid little attention to the influence of Black and feminist thinkers, they have nevertheless viewed philosophy as a response to the changing circumstances of the culture from which it emerges. My study begins within this same tradition by focusing on the experience of different perspectives, practices, values, and standards of judgment as the challenge to which the philosophy of pragmatism was the response. At the intersection of the work by the classical pragmatists are four shared commitments: the principles of interaction, pluralism, community, and growth. Each commitment contributes to a philosophy of respect for difference and each, I will argue, can be traced to the Native philosophical tradition. The first principle, interaction, is best expressed by the famous pragmatic maxim of Peirce: our conception of a thing is a conception of its effects, its interactions. This idea that meaning is a matter of interaction has both epistemological and ontological implications. On one hand, how the world is known is a matter of the interactions between knowers and the world. On the other, what things are in the world is best understood as their potential in interaction. In a diverse world, the principle of interaction focuses attention on the experiences of cultural contact as a source of meaning. The second principle, pluralism, involves a three fold expectation: that there are different ways of knowing and kinds of knowledge; that experience is characterized by an ineliminable pluralism; and that human society will reflect a deep cultural pluralism tied to different ways of knowing and being. In effect, pluralism makes interaction a matter of context or situation. The third principle, community, emphasizes that in a world characterized by interaction and difference, the community will provide a context for understanding and acting. This centrality of communities also leads to a corollary that amounts to a kind of general moral principle: at the center of communities will be a shared practice of hospitality or welcome that both sustains the community and sets limits on the actions of those who are part of it. The fourth principle, growth, serves as one standard for judgment. Commitment to the principle of growth marks an expectation that things and events that foster connections, sustained relations, and new possibilities are goods to be sought. Unlike a view that posits progress as a kind of general measure against which everything can be evaluated, growth is a standard embedded in daily life relative to the circumstances at hand. As a result, growth is a standard that is necessarily revisable and must be determined and reassessed in terms of lived experience and careful reflection. American pragmatism, I argue, begins along the border between Native and European America as an attitude of resistance against the dominant attitudes of European colonialism. In chapters three and four, I develop the character of this colonial attitude in order to provide a background for the development of pragmatism and I illustrate the often-conflicting interests within the recognized American tradition. The colonial attitude is displayed in the work of the Puritan historian and philosopher, Cotton Mather, of Thomas Jefferson, and of the Jacksonian historian and philosopher, George Bancroft. Despite the radical differences between their views and how historians of philosophy have viewed their work, the three nevertheless share a philosophical perspective characterized by the colonial attitude. The attitude, reminiscent of what Dewey called the "quest for certainty," amounts to a particular way of understanding the world which reduces meaning to a single set of truths and a single hierarchy of value. Although each version of the attitude is grounded in a different philosophical language, each is led in practice to exclusion, intolerance and attempts to eliminate difference. Against this logic of domination, an indigenous attitude characterized by commitments to interaction, pluralism, community and growth became apparent to non-native people who rejected the colonial attitude and became part of a long intellectual tradition that includes classical pragmatism, anti-racism, and feminism. In the fifth and sixth chapters, I show that the commitments of pragmatism were already well established aspects of Native culture when they began to emerge in European American thought. I illustrate the priority of Native ideas and an instance of their adoption into European American thought by looking at the work of the Puritan minister and philosopher Roger Williams. I show that Williams developed a distinctive version of the indigenous attitude through his friendship with the Narragansett leader, Miantonomi, and other Native Americans along the Northeast American coast in the mid-17th century. Through a close analysis of the Narragansett response to outsiders developed in a range of "Mohowaúgsuck" or cannibal stories and Williams’ own discussions of Native thought, I argue that his conception of a pluralist community and the philosophical attitude that supports it is grounded in Native thought. Williams’ work provides a crucial instance of how Native American thought could be learned and come to influence the views of European Americans. It also helps to lay the groundwork for the adoption of the indigenous attitude as a mode of resistance to colonial ways of thinking in later generations of American thinkers. The seventh and eighth chapters trace the broadening influence of the indigenous attitude through the Native prophetic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. This movement of Native American orators and political and military leaders focused on establishing native land rights and cultural autonomy. In doing so, however, it also brought forward another version of the indigenous attitude as a standpoint of resistance to the increasingly powerful colonial attitude. I look in particular at the speeches of Teedyuscung and Neolin of the Delaware people, Tenskwatawa of the Shawnee, and Sagoyewatha of the Seneca. These speakers at once demonstrate a commitment to the four principles that are central to pragmatism and make explicit the ways that these commitments lead to an alternative way to organize and value things and events. The result is a logic of place that locates meaning in situations that are framed by culture and environment. This attitude, from the perspective of many European Americans, provided both a means of resistance and a model for an alternative way to understand and act in the world. I consider the impact of the movement in particular on the work of Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In crucial ways, these two thinkers represent the central intellectual tradition that led to Peirce’s and James’ initial formulations of pragmatism. Franklin, whose work in Pennsylvania brought him in close contact with Teedyuscung and other native leaders, welded science and community together through an attitude and logic remarkably similar to that of the Native prophetic movement. Emerson, also familiar with the Native prophetic movement through his brother, Charles, and his friend and collaborator, Margaret Fuller, carried on the attitude popularized by Franklin and translated it into the language of 19th century European philosophy. His conceptions of nature, individuals in community, difference and growth helped to set the stage for the work of the classical pragmatists. In the ninth and tenth chapters I examine the influence of the Native prophetic movement on the development of Black resistance to slavery and on the women’s movement of the first half of the 19th century. These two chapters are especially important because they argue both for the importance of native thought in the development of African American and feminist philosophy, but they also identify a key source for the later classical pragmatists. By the 1820’s, the Native prophetic movement became a model for public resistance to the United States policy of Indian removal (formalized by Congress and President Andrew Jackson in 1830). At the same time, white political leaders established the American Colonization Society (whose membership included Jackson) to advocate for the removal of free Blacks to Africa. In the face of this second removal policy, Black leaders adopted the attitude and many of the arguments already well established by Tenskwatawa and Sagoyewatha. These Black leaders, including William Hamilton, Peter Williams, and Nathaniel Paul, argued for the establishment of culturally distinct Black communities in North America. The ground laid by these thinkers reemerged in the reconstruction theories of Frederick Douglass, John H. Smyth, Anna Julia Cooper, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. The American feminist movement shares similar roots. Also in response to the Native Prophetic movement’s resistance to removal, a number of women authors adopted attitudes similar to those found in the northeast native traditions in order to establish an alternative conception of the role of women in European American society. From this perspective, women were understood to have a key role in establishing the structure of home and community and in responding to social ills. Further, the process of understanding and acting in community seemed to require an approach of the sort found in the logic of place as developed by the Native prophetic movement. Taken up by feminist writers, this approach, which I call domestic analysis, first emerges in the work of Catherine Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child in their novels about Native and European women which were strongly influenced by the activism of the Native prophetic movement. The strategies developed in these works became a widely shared alternative way of understanding and responding to social crises and problems of difference in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Addams. These two philosophical traditions, Black abolitionism and American feminism, take the logic of the Native prophetic movement as a way of establishing both a conception of difference and a model for reconstructing communities to be compatible with pluralism. It is the influence of these movements and their application of the indigenous attitude to other kinds of social problems that serves to reunite the pragmatism of Peirce and James with the social activist pragmatism of Dewey at the turn of the century. In the final chapter, I argue that classical pragmatism and its four commitments emerge from a complex environment influenced by the traditions of Franklin and Emerson, Williams and Paul, and Sedgwick and Child. While the classical pragmatists also display the influences of the colonial attitude, their basic approach and their important philosophical ideas, including their conceptions of human identity, community, and inquiry, can provide guidance for developing a philosophical attitude appropriate for the culturally diverse world of the 21st century. In the end, the recovery of the history of pragmatism becomes more than the development of a particular philosophy. It becomes the recovery of a rich American philosophical tradition–diverse in its thinkers, plural in its traditions, and potentially valuable in its implications for life in a multicultural world.