Jeffrey Glover. Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604–1664.

Abstract

Treaties have been a fundamental component of relations between Indians and non-Natives in North America from first contacts to the present. They have received considerable scholarly attention and currently feature in a major exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Until recently, however, historians have viewed them as instruments of colonial and national domination and dispossession rather than as cultural encounters between sovereign nations, and have concentrated on treaty making in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on diplomatic encounters during the seventeenth century, Jeffrey Glover, an English professor, examines Indian diplomacy at a time when Native nations still held considerable power and European colonists often had to negotiate on Indian terms. Indians and Europeans each brought their own protocols and understandings to treaty making, creating new forms of diplomacy, and each had to adjust to new realities and expectations. Instead of domineering Europeans dictating terms to gullible Natives, treaty making on the east coast involved a delicate, and often carefully choreographed, cultural and political dance as English colonists dealt with different Indian nations pursuing their own, sometimes shifting, agendas, while the royal government and foreign rivals watched from the wings.