American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850

Abstract

American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal 1500-1850. Edited by Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell. (New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xiv, 594. Illustrations. $90.00.) Instructors in seminars or other advanced courses in Indian history, to say nothing of specialists in other fields suddenly faced with the need to become experts on ethnohistory, will find their coursepack conveniently done for them in this collection of twenty-five classic articles. scope actually goes beyond European contact, since Neil Salisbury's essay, The Indians' Old World, brilliantly describes the many oscillations in material culture, economic practice, and socio-political structure that Indians had initiated or undergone before contact with Europeans occurred. James Axtell's effort-in a much-reprinted article on what colonial history might have been like without Indians (Colonial America Without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections, Journal of American History, 63 [March 1987], 981-86)-to encourage the inclusion of ethnohistory in mainstream media appears to have succeeded. present volume, unlike others, leaves that article out in favor of Axtell's striking analysis of the successful methods of Indian assimilation of white adoptees into their societies. Yet most of the articles in this volume come from mainstream publications: the Journal of American History, Journal of Women's History, Canadian Historical Review, Southern California Quarterly, and, above all, from the publication nearest Axtell's home university, the William and Mary Quarterly. Indian-oriented publications such as Ethnohistory, the American Indian Quarterly, and the American Indian Cultural and Research Journal are respectably but less fully represented. Chapters from books (including a festschrift for Oscar Handlin) come about equally from those devoted to ethnohistory and more general collections. In the colonial era, at least, historians of the American Indian appear to be swimming with the tide in the main stream. articles tend to focus on geographical areas currently inside the United States and British colonies, although other areas are represented as well. One contribution deals with Spanish Florida and two with Spanish California; Cornelis J. Jaenens addresses French Canadian themes, Helen Hornbeck Tanner discusses the multiethnic Ohio country, and Raymond Hansen and Daniel H. Usner examine areas of French influence. Nearly all emphasize native experience more fully than European policy or the adventures of white frontierspeople, and most follow Usner's lead in defining frontier in terms of intercultural exchange rather than linear boundaries. Richard White's masterful analysis of Lakota imperialism constitutes his direct contribution to the collection. Yet his notion of the middle ground where exchange involves relatively egalitarian trade, labor, and marital relations in a context where each group tries-not always successfully-to employ practices congenial to the other, informs several essays (The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815[1991]). Perhaps the most amusing example of this genre is Timothy J. Shannon's Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrik, Sir William Johnson, and Indian Fashion. Both Usner, writing of the lower Mississippi Valley, and Tanner, writing of the Ohio country's Glaize in 1792, stress the varieties of nationality and ethnicity involved in intercultural exchange. …