Letters to the Editor

Abstract

To the Editor: I am mystified by the JAH review of Carl J. Ekberg's Stealing Indian Women (June 2008, p. 180). As an ethnohistorian who for over thirty years has been immersed in the documentary record for the colonial period of the middle Mississippi Valley, who has published fairly extensively on the Woodland and Plains Indians and aspects of the British and French occupations, and who has written on ethnohistorical theory, I do not hesitate to say that the review has three very serious failings: (1) there is nothing in it to indicate that the author has any personal knowledge of the specific documentary base, and much to indicate ignorance of it; (2) it ignores Ekberg's stated parameters for his discussion; (3) it misstates—and quite seriously—the author's conclusions. If the reviewer read the book, which seems doubtful to me for several reasons, he did not understand what it said. The...