Indians and Race in Early America: A Review Essay

Abstract

This article explores the contours of a newly vibrant literature on American Indians and race in early America by reviewing the conclusions offered in ten books published between 2001 and 2004. It focuses on three issues: the Euro-American move toward racializing Indians; the Native Americans’ own perspectives on difference and race; and the degree to which the beliefs of Native and EuroAmericans emerged as a consequence of cross-cultural conversations. Traditionally, the discussion of race in early America has relied upon a series of interlinked dichotomies: race/ethnicity, biology/culture, inherent/learned, slave/free, and, most centrally, black/white. Legacies of these binaries remain with us today, primarily in our teaching but also, to some extent, in our research. Even as several generations’ worth of scholarship has called into question the assumptions underlying these oppositions, and even as the deconstructionist assault has undermined the legitimacy of dichotomous constructions more generally, we continue to find it difficult to escape the dead hand of past structures and inherited frameworks. Nowhere has this been more clear than in the halting and incomplete incorporation of Native American peoples and perspectives into our conversation about race in early America. As recently as 1997, Joyce Chaplin could baldly but accurately assert that “Indians have been neglected in interpretations of American racism”; two years later, Kathleen Brown could suggest “there may be an interesting history of early modern racial formation yet to be written about the Englishman and the Indian.” 1 Their comments strongly suggest that the periodic invocation of “red, white, and black” and the appearance of an occasional essay focused on Natives notwithstanding, the literature on race in early America simply had little room for Indians as recently as the late 1990s. The situation has changed dramatically in the last few years. Enough significant scholarship had emerged by 2003 that Chaplin ‐ who only a half dozen years earlier had lamented scholars’ neglect of Indians ‐ could assert that “the most recent research on early America looks at both Native Americans and captured Africans”; she went on to describe works