Facing East from Indian Country

Daniel K. Richter. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Any attempt, no matter how well-meaning, to "write Indians into" a standard narrative history of early British North America must confront the asymmetrical availability of sources.  The Indians did not produce their own written sources, and the early English colonists never betrayed much interest in understanding native peoples. Advances in archaeology and other fields have given once-silenced Indian peoples a voice, but in the standard teleological narrative that voice struggles to be heard above the much more robust and explicit record that English colonists left behind.

Richter has found a novel way to address that imbalance--by reversing the point of view. The "facing east" of the title is literal; this is a (sometimes speculative) re-imagining of the story from the perspective of Indians witnessing and coping with the arrival of Europeans. By reversing the point of view, the relative paucity of written sources no longer tilts the playing ground in favor of the literate Euro-Americans.

Another advantage of Richter's approach is that it emphasizes the historical nature of the Indian side of the story. Native peoples were part of history, not the victims of history as so many well-meaning histories have portrayed them. Their removal was neither the inevitable workings of demographic inevitability nor a morality tale for future generations.

By framing the traditional colonial story in a way in which the "west" is the center rather than the dimly-known frontier, Richter not only offers an Indian-centric version of early American history, he also sheds new light on well-known dynamics of colonial land acquisition, resource use, and more. T

Creatures of Empire

Virginia DeJohn Anderson. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Anderson’s work is an important contribution to the field of environmental history, one which builds on previous studies by focusing on domestic animals as active agents and direct causes of ecological change. Earlier environmental histories examined how the introduction of European domestic animals into the Americas inflicted a wide variety of changes to the ecosystem. Domestic animals competed with native fauna for food, introduced new pathogens and microorganisms, and hastened the transformation of the land in general. But Anderson moves beyond those indirect changes. Her book is a study of how domestic animals directly affected the lives and actions of both colonists and Indians in colonial British North America. She reframes the story of colonial America by presenting livestock as actors alongside the other two groups.

The role that livestock played was hardly peripheral, either—in the Prologue, she states that:

            “To a remarkable extent, the reactions of Indians and colonists to problems created by livestock became a reliable indicator of the tenor of their relations with each other.”

The key phrase in that quote is “problems created by”. In Anderson’s account, the domestic animals which English colonialists introduced to North America were never completely under the control of the English settlers, nor were Indians ever able to contain the actions of animals within their own sphere of activity.

The reason for this—and probably the key point for Anderson’s entire argument—was that the conditions of settlement in British North America precluded the sort of complete and comprehensive control over domestic animals which English famers were accustomed to and routinely practiced in the mother country. English husbandry was a well-developed practice with a substantive body of tradition and literature, which was tailored to the well-developed, heavily populated, and thoroughly demarcated English landscape. Colonialists brought their assumptions about husbandry to the New World along with their animals, but the reality of establishing new English-style settlements stymied attempts to recreate old ways. There was simply too much work to be done—fields to be cleared, buildings to be erected, market infrastructure to be developed—and too little labor to be devoted to other, less essential tasks. Therefore, the careful practices of ideal husbandry, which necessitated a great deal of personal oversight and management—as well as sizeable fenced fields and barns—failed to take root.

Instead, English settlers soon took to allowing their livestock to take care of themselves—which, in practice, meant allowing them to room in the woods and fields beyond the “improved” lands on their farms.

This brought the animals directly into competition—and conflict—with the Indians who relied on the woods for hunting and fishing. Nor did rooting, loose swine respect the integrity of Indian fields, which—unlike English fields—were unfenced. English assumptions about “improvement” and the proper mode of agriculture simply could not credit Indian land use as legitimate. While Indians practiced a mode of living which was fluid and mobile, English agriculture was based on an ideal of fixed settlement—proper agriculture, in the English mind, was marked by permanent structures such as houses, barns, and outbuildings, as well as fences. Indian fields, which were farmed by women rather than by men, and without the use of beasts of burden, seemed wild, messy, and uncivilized to English observers. And while colonists were willing to concede the legitimacy of Indian agriculture—however second-rate it seemed to be—they did not recognize the use of forest land as legitimate in the slightest. Hunting and fishing were not efficient uses of “unimproved” land so Indian complaints regarding the invasion of those spaces by free-range livestock gained no traction in colonial courts, or elsewhere in the British American imagination.

The other key axis on which conflicting Indian and colonial reactions to livestock hinged on was differing conceptions of “property.” Indian notions of property were temporally limited and contingent—more specifically, Indians understood property in terms of use. Resources were only “owned” when they were used and/or needed. For example, no individual, town or tribe “owned” wild deer; but when a hunter or a group of hunters killed a deer, then they owned that deer. English notions of property, of course, were much different—based on absolute and exclusive notions of ownership which were static and non-negotiable. These conflicting conceptions would create endless conflict as Indian hunters struggled to understand, for example, why it was OK to kill a deer but not a hog which had just rooted up an entire field of maize, beans, and squash.

The English plan to set a “civilizing” example to the Indians by their own allegedly superior modes of agricultural production would founder at least partly due to their failure to control their own domestic animals. Yet eventually, they would learn that those same animals were quite effective as weapons of imperialism, as they could undermine and help destroy the capacity of Indians in their vicinity to successfully maintain their food supply. The English finally understood that while they hadn’t managed to fully control their animals, they could still use them towards the desired end—the removal and dispossession of the indigenous people. 

Changes in the Land

William Cronon. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, 2003.

Cronon's first book--published when he was 28 years old--has become a modern classic as well as a seminal text in what has become known as environmental history.

It is a brief book, one which still is impressive and eye-opening over three decades later, although the fact that environmental history is now far more prevalent means that the book isn't quite the shock now it must have been when first published. Still, it is easy to see why it won the 1984 Francis Parkman Prize. This is an elegantly written monograph which calmly and deliberately makes its point: "the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes--well known to historians--in the ways these peoples organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations--less well known to historians--in the region's plant and animal communities." (From the Preface).

In other words, there was an ecological change as well as economic, political, social, and demographic changes, in the wake of contact between Indians and Europeans, and subsequent settlement by the latter.

The book is marked by the obvious contrast between Indian use of the land versus that pursued by the colonists, but Cronon takes great care to avoid falling in to a lazy dichotomy--as he notes at the beginning of Chapter 7, "A World of Fields and Fences":

"One must not exaggerate the differences between English and Indian agriculture. The two in many ways resembled each other in the annual cycles by which they tracked the seasons of the year."

He also cautions against the tendency to interpret the vast changes wrought by the introduction of European trade goods into Indian societies to the technologies themselves--rather, it was the new mode of economic logic and the new agents tied to larger markets, not the trade goods themselves, which were often used by Indians in ways very different than intended--often as markers of status rather than as utilitarian goods. Also, Indians tended to incorporate these goods into existing patterns of economic use, so assumptions that "improved" European goods necessarily altered economic practices don't add up.

Other contrasts--the distinction between "sovereignty" and "ownership" in regards to land ownership (and differing Indian and English concepts of both)--inform this richly detailed look at the environmental history of the region which was--to paraphrase his comments about history in his afterword to this 20th anniversary edition--going on all around the people in the past although the didn't realize it was happening.

American Colonies

Alan Taylor. American Colonies: The Settling of North America. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Alan Taylor's book was to be the projected first volume of a series, "The Penguin History of the United States." Given this start, and the fact that it was to be edited by Eric Foner, it's a shame that the series seems to have been shelved. We can be grateful that we got this volume, though--Taylor has written an excellent synthesis history of "colonial America" re-imagined in ways which that venerable descriptor fails to signify in the popular imagination.

The first hint to where Taylor takes the reader is in the title--this is a history of multiple colonies, rather than the singular tale of the British North Ameican colonies spreading westward across an empty, formless continent. Taylor tells a more nuanced story--one which is aimed at the general reader, the college undergraduate, and ultimately anyone interested in rethinking old assumptions about the colonial period.

The story begins with the American Indians of North America, and then moves across the Atlantic to consider Western Europe on the verge of the colonial era. In this second chapter, we meet many "colonizers" including of course Christopher Columbus--but from there rather than move quickly to the British story, first the reader gets a chapter each on New Spain and New France.

The point here is to look at the colonies as they were, not as precursors to what the reader knows is coming. The second section of the book is a detailed look at the British colonies in North America, including the West Indies. A consistent theme of this section is the dynamic nature of Indian societies during this period--American Indian societies were constantly adjusting to, and affecting, the rise of Euro-American settlement. This section also gives consideration to the colonies of New Netherlands and even New Sweden.

The final section, "Empires", traces the story of how these different colonial empires collided and contested the North American continent between them--while never losing sight of the Indians who were caught in the crossfire, or the African-American slaves who were compelled to play a role in this story. The book ends far away from the Atlantic seaboard, on the islands of Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest. Taylor spreads a wide net, and the result is a very readable reconsideration of the story of "colonial America."

Protestant Empire

Carla Gardina Pestana. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.

Pestina's book is an interesting take on Atlantic history, one which--as the title indicates--focuses on religion. Her research and range is impressive, and for Americanists it is very instructive to see events such as First and Second Great Awakenings placed in a larger, Atlantic context. More broadly, she traces how the religious pluralism that the United States boasted from its inception was not only a product of trans-Atlantic transportation and New World experimentation--a common trope of American history--but also was part of a larger, dynamic process of "circulation", "transplantation", and "negotiation" throughout the growing British Atlantic world. British efforts to mimic Spanish success in using the national church as a tool for colony building and enforcing national unity largely failed, although in the end this failure led to a relatively more ecumenical pan-Protestant British nationalism. This would have important consequences throughout the British Atlantic as well as in the mother country. In the United States, it facilitated the rise of a degree of religious heterogeneity that virtually dictated the creation of the American concept of "separation of church and state", simply because the leaders of the Revolution and then the new republic recognized that there was no way to enforce conformity across such a diverse spectrum of denominations.

Pestana does a very deft job of balancing the various theaters across two full centuries. She explains how the religious and denominational situation was different in England (and Wales, which largely followed the English lead with some exceptions), Scotland, and Ireland. The attempts of the Anglican Church to impose its will throughout England was never completely successful, which partly explains the failure of English authorities to put sufficient effort and resources into their plans to use the church as an institution of state control throughout their colonial possessions. In Scotland, the strength and independence of the Presbyterian kirk not only affected Scottish history, but also provided a base from which that denomination was able to exert influence throughout the empire. And in Ireland, the persistence of Catholicism among the majority was one factor feeding the anti-Catholicism of English nationalism; ultimately, though, this persistence would also support the eventual relaxation of suppression of the church in the UK.

Chapter One, “Religion before English Expansion”, is a look at the religious worlds of the three main regions of what would become the British Atlantic World circa 1500—eastern North America, western Europe, and West Africa. This is not an exercise in comparative history, however, but instead a look at three distinct religious worlds which will be drawn into contact and conflict during the following three centuries. She outlines some differences between the three different religious norms, perhaps most notably the Western Christian beliefs regarding conversion (17). According to Pestana, European Christians tended to regard conversion as a convulsive and decisive decision, rather than a conditional or gradual process. This conceptualization would prove problematic when Euro-American colonists were later faced with native “converts” who approached the decision to embrace Christianity on their own terms—conditionally, and often in negotiation with traditional Native beliefs.

Along with the differences, Pestana also emphasizes underlying similarities—which were generally ignored by most Europeans at the time but which allowed for a more complex process of acculturation and adaptation by American Indians and transplanted African slaves. Despite outward differences between European Christianity, West African traditional religions, and American Indian animism, was a common belief in “densely occupied spiritual landscape”. (18) The three worlds had different rituals and different seasonal calendars, but they all had them. There were several other shared general traits as well. While the differences would largely prove relevant because English colonists would rely on them to justify unilaterally establishing dominance and pushing for “spiritual hegemony”, the similarities would prove important because they explained how Indians and Africans negotiated the belief system of the dominant Euro-American culture often by finding parallels and commonalities which were compatible with their own belief systems.

These three worlds would soon come into intimate contact, but the first convulsion to this order occurred within Western Europe—the Reformation. The rise of Protestantism forced a cleavage in the formally unified Western Christian world. The divisions were often along national lines, as with the establishment of the Church of England. In other places, the division shook the unity of nascent nation-states, driving rulers to at least attempt to impose homogeneity. Religion became tied to nationality and state-building in the wake of the Reformation. In the British world, this tendency was complicated by a number of factors, including the failure of Anglicanism to completely dominate England; the rise of Presbyterianism as the main religion in Scotland; the persistence of a Catholic minority in Great Britain; and the attempt to conquer, subdue, and incorporate Catholic Ireland into the polity.

Rather than resolves these tensions, the English crown ended up exporting them, as different faiths and religious institutions were able to establish themselves in different colonies. And in turn, these colonial settlements provided “laboratories” in which religious institutions could experiment and develop—and then transmit newly strengthened religious identities back to the home country. The colonies also provided a base for Protestant sects such as the Puritans and the Quakers to develop their own orthodoxies and institutions. These would play a role in politics back in England.

In the end, the British polity would create a new pan-Atlantic ‘Britishness’ based on a broad commitment to Protestantism, rather than a narrower conception of Anglicanism as the basis of citizenship and patriotism. The British turned the heterogeneous nature of British religious life into an asset, as they united disparate denominations into a relatively unified anti-Catholicism.

Pestana has created a fresh vantage point from which to view American religious history as well as Atlantic history. My only complaint with this book is a minor one. She has a tendency to overly elaborate at times--some points are repeated for no apparent reason. And frequently she will repeat an explanation in one chapter of a point that was already elaborated in a previous chapter. The latter might very well be a result of a long process of writing and development. The former, however, sometimes seems a matter of occasional clumsiness. This, however, is a very minor problem, and Petana might very well counter that she would rather make her point too well than not well enough.

The Web of Empire

Alison Games. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolians in an Age of Expansion 1560-1660. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008

Games has written a provocative history of the English traders, ministers, ambassadors, adventurers, merchants, and colonists of a period spanning the rise of the English state as a rival--at first an underdog, but then increasingly a formidable foe--to the other centralized European trading and colonizing powers during the century indicated in the title. In doing so, she has implicitly taken American colonial history beyond Atlantic history into a more global arena. She also refutes the conventional wisdom regarding the centrality of the Irish experience to the colonial enterprise in North America. This study forces Americanists to reconsider the early colonial experience within a broader framework than most histories have conceptualized.

Her argument covers a lot of ground both spatially and temporally, but the central theme is this--during the rise of English expansionism, the English state was weak relative to other Western European powers, meaning that the English lacked the robust military and naval resources to confront imperial rivals directly or to impose their wishes on various foreign peoples and entities. The English were late to the game in establishing trading connections in the Mediterranean, in Africa, the Indian Ocean, East Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Time and time again, the English found themselves operating from a position of weakness--forced to rely on the expertise of other Europeans, and to accommodate to local conditions and mores to a degree which was quite troubling at a time when concerns over English sovereignty and threats to Protestant sanctity made the very act of travelling suspect. Let alone a willingness to engage foreigners and non-Protestants on their own terms. The cosmopolitanism of these Englishmen was hard-won and fraught with dangers both foreign and domestic.

This era ends with the rise of a more centralized state which was far more willing and able to expend resources on the tools of imposing its will on other peoples as well as its own subjects--particularly a larger standing army and a state-controlled navy. This process was started by Cromwell, and ironically continued by Charles II. The reliance on private militias and armed merchant ships would be a thing of the past, as would (eventually) the cosmopolitanism of the time. The English would eventually come to rely on coercion and force to impose their will as the growing power of their state allowed them to develop new tools of empire.

However, the transition did not happen immediately, meaning that the British North American colonies were largely founded by men working in the early dynamic that Games articulates. The fact that the later, more centralized mode of British imperialism post-dated the establishment of the thirteen mainland colonies surely influenced the American colonists expectations over their relationship to the mother country. That is another story, but while Games does not look ahead to the eventual break, the implication is there in the final pages. While this book is immediately a study of an important stage in the growth of the British state and its global role, American historians will benefit from this opportunity to see the British founding of the colonies in a new context. 

The Birth of America

William R. Polk. The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.

Polk--a descendant of the American president with the same surname--has spent most of his long career as a diplomat and political scholar, but with this book he chose to, as he states in the introduction, offer a "different angle of vision" on the history of the colonial era of American history. The introduction presents a brief synopsis of American historiography, reinforcing his point that the story of America's founding still needs to be revisited and retold in the light of new sources, new points of view, and new interpretations. So, as a non-American historian but an experienced scholar, he offers his own version.

How does he do? To begin with, credit must be given--he has done his research. For a non-specialist, he has an impressive command of a wide range of sources. Polk is writing for a general audience, and his writing style is well-suited to finding a broader audience than many academics. He has a good eye for telling anecdotes and examples, and he utilizes them frequently to bring this far-reaching narrative to life. 

The story he tells is hardly comprehensive--Polk is very good at giving the Indian story its due, and he places slavery at the very center of the colonial saga, but he has little if anything to say about gender or family, nor does he trouble himself too much with culture or intellectual history. But these are observations, not criticisms. This is a "big picture" story which is deeply rooted in an Atlantic history perspective. Part I, "Europe and Africa Come to America" takes up the first 100 pages of a 309-page text, so that the book devotes fully a third of its length to the various actors who would collide, collude, and intermingle in what became British North America.

Even a specialist night enjoy his take. His eye for detail, noted above, keeps the story fresh even when the general outline is already known. True to his explanation at the very beginning that history is not fixed and is always affected by what is important in the present, some of the details he chooses to highlight are very pointed rejoinders to contemporary (mis-)readings. His assertion that most colonial Americans neither owned guns nor knew how to use them would be quite a surprise in many circles where references to the Founders are routine.

All in all, this is a lively and well-crafted book; Polk fulfills his promise to the reader to take a "fresh look" at a story all too many Americans think they know better than they actually do.