I'm looking for any methodological/historiography articles that I could give to my students on the connotations behind using the term "tribe" to discuss groups of indigenous peoples at the stage of colonial contact (mostly looking at 16th- and 17th- century coastal Africa, and 17th- and 18th- century North America).
I have zero sense of the non-European actors' category language in any these areas and regions. And while I have a passable amount of knowledge on decolonizing education, I don't actually have any resources on so specific as a problem.
I get that I've handed you pretty big regions in this query (and not short time periods to boot), but I'm casting a strategically wide net. At this stage I would be happy to hand them anything to just start thinking about the use of terms before they deploy them, just as I have been able to do for language that requires critical thinking when describing Europe pre-1800: nation (with some reference to the politics of using "nation" for indigenous peoples in North American settler territory), nationalism, citizenship, immigration, minorities, race, etc.
Caveat: I am not treating this as an issue of "political correctness"; it is a quite intellectually conservative query about historical accuracy. Yes, it is, surely, attached to issues of whose language we employ when writing history now. But, if we don't care about the effects of language in historical writing and thinking, why are we even doing history?
EDIT: I'd also take any historical/philological investigations into the deployment of the term "tribe" as it has changed over time.
EDIT: minor grammatical and punctuation edits.
I wrote about this a few times, in this Monday Methods
this podcast episode also contains a bibliography about the scholarship surrounding tribe and ethnicity in Africa.
the connotations behind using the term "tribe" to discuss groups of indigenous peoples at the stage of colonial contact (mostly looking at 16th- and 17th- century coastal Africa, and 17th- and 18th- century North America).
The books listed above focus heavily on 19th and 20th century European categorization of African societies, I don't believe there will be that much that discusses specifically 16th or 17th century.
For that you could look at secondary literature by John Thornton and Linda Heywood. Especially Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World by Thornton, which delves into social structures along the atlantic coast.
For primary source accounts from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, you could look into Africa and the West; a Documentary History volume 1, which covers the years 1440-1905. There is also Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southern Africa by Elizabeth Eldredge, which contains quotations from Portuguese shipwreck survivors in Southeastern Africa in the 16th century.
I'd like to note, however, that Portuguese sources from this time period usually do not use the term "tribe". Instead, they generally use terminology like Prince, King, Kingdom. e.g. the Prince of Jolof (in modern Senegal), the king of Kongo, the Reino de Angola ("kingdom of Angola", which itself is a mistranslation/malapropism, because Ngola is a Mbundu word meaning "lord". Ngola a Ndembu is the "lord of the place called Ndembu")
It seems to me, (and I may be mistaken), that the systematic use of the term "tribe" to refer to African societies really began in the later 19th century. There may have been references to African "tribes" in the 17th century, but as far as I can tell such terminology was uncommon.