I'm a person of Native-American ancestry, and while I don't consider myself one because I'm mixed, I've always had an interest in Native-American culture and just tribes in general. Me and my family were talking about things we'd like to study, and I brought up history-- this eventually led me to wonder if there were any fields on the history of Native-Americans or indigenous peoples, and I was eventually led to etnohistory. I've never heard of it before, and my family says that neither have they.
I'd really, really like to know more about this specific field and I'd like to hear from someone who has seen/done it firsthand.
What would you like to know? There is a professional organization, the American Society for Ethohistory. The organization publishes a journal Ethnohistory. Currently, most members of the society specialize in either North American indigenous history or indigenous history in Latin America. The society and journal also encourages research into other subaltern peoples of the Americas including individuals of African and Asian ancestry.
Ethnohistorians come from various academic disciplines: history, cultural anthropology, geography, archaeology, linguistics, etc.
I study the history of race in colonial Latin America and the shared experiences of Africans and indigenous people in early Spanish America. While almost all of my sources are official Spanish documents, I try to ‘read across the grain’ to tease out ethnohistorical information and disentangle it from Spanish prejudices.
One of the historical short comings of ethnohistory in the US is that we have not had as many indigenous practitioners as we should. More indigenous voices will help the discipline in ways we cannot even predict.