Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500 – 1800

Abstract

John Kizca’s introductory study of native peoples in both North and South America fills the need for a classroom text that tells “the other side of the story” of European colonization in the Americas, and it also contextualizes a current expanding definition of American studies in the United States. It would also be useful for more narrowly defined classes on ethnohistory or American Indian history. The book takes a wide-angle view of how native peoples confronted European colonizing projects in both continents. For the ambitious project of synthesizing a large body of ethnohistorical literature on two continents, few scholars are more qualified than Kizca. The author builds primarily on the rich body of historical and ethnohistorical work published in the 1980s and 1990s, with a nod to earlier classics. His synthesis follows recent shifts away from an earlier perspective that emphasized the pristine “civilized” empires of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca or that celebrated the lamentable but inevitable subjugation of native peoples in the name of progress.Kizca views all native peoples (“civilized” or not) as actors in confronting European colonialism, an important and inclusive perspective that is new in Latin American historiography. He follows a conventional periodization of exploration and conquest, early colonization, and postindependence. This approach elides the possibility that the conquest may have been a nonevent for many native peoples. There is plenty of evidence that native epistemelogical understandings may have been more challenged by the virulent pandemics that spread in advance of colonization and that the flight-or-fight patterns of semisedentary or sedentary tribes was a continuation of precolonial strategies.Kizca organizes precolonial native peoples using traditional static categories: sedentary imperial societies, semisedentary societies, and nonsedentary or nomadic people. He applies each of these categories to each of the periods discussed, despite considerable reference to recent scholarship that points to more fluid social processes of centralization and decentralization. In the text, however, the author does challenge the underlying subtext of social Darwinism implicit in these categories (nomadism as a stage in progress toward civilized nation-states) by citing literature documenting societies that turned from semisedentary to nomadic lifestyles and vice versa.In his discussion of colonial Spanish America and its impact on sedentary imperial societies, he presents solid descriptions and illustrative detail about the demise of the Aztec and Inca empires, and he corrects ideas about the Maya by stressing the relative social fluidity of the Maya region. His discussion of the Christianization process, and what Kicza calls the integration of saints, is particularly strong, especially for readers with little background in Latin American studies. In contrast, this reader found the jumping back and forth from New Spain to Peru, particularly in the chapter entitled “Colonial Spanish America and Its Impact on the Sedentary Imperial Societies,” confusing, and I wonder if it might leave a nonspecialist with an overly simplistic impression of the Aztec or Inca empires while glossing over important differences. On the other hand, the discussion of tribal peoples in the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the desert regions of northern Mexico provides a good summary of recent work on the marginal zones of colonial projects. There is little said about the creation of marron societies that incorporated escaped African slaves into native societies of various sorts in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic Coast (though in fairness, much of the recent research on this topic was published after the present volume was completed).Kicza’s discussion of native responses to the French in Canada (though not in the Gulf Coast region), to the Dutch and the English in the northeastern Atlantic Coast, and the Spanish in the Southwest (considered separately from greater Mesoamerica) reviews solid ethnohistorical research that has prompted important revisions in the historiography of the North American colonies. The chapters on “Native Response to Settlement in the East and Southwest” and “The British and the Indians of Eastern North America” rely on this work to develop a chronological overview. His maps in particular are very helpful. Still, the vantage point of the chronological overview begins with Spanish colonization in Meso- and South America, Portuguese colonization in eastern South America, and French, Dutch, and British colonization in eastern North America, rather than from the perspective of native societies. This approach may obscure the centrality of native peoples in the interstices in shaping and in defining the ultimate boundaries of these competing colonial projects, but then one can’t do it all in a survey text.The strength of this book lies in its accurate and comprehensive coverage of a large body of ethnohistorical literature. It is the kind of text that can be particularly useful as a basic introduction for any number of preliminary courses in Latin American or Native American history, as well as for other disciplines, and for that it is to be recommended.