The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation

Abstract

While Colin Calloway’s latest book returns to a topic the author has visited throughout his career, eighteenth-century Native history, it does so from a new angle. In The Indian World of George Washington, Calloway’s objective is to attract readers whose interests typically lie in the genre of presidential or Founding Father biography. As the title suggests, George Washington is the vehicle through which the author aims to persuade these readers to think deeply about Native peoples and their role in shaping the history of the United States.Calloway’s work still demonstrates the power and influence Native peoples wielded throughout eighteenth-century North America. Washington’s importance to the early history of the United States assists in communicating this message to nonspecialists. By analyzing how Native peoples informed Washington’s actions and decision-making, his successes and failures, Calloway leaves the reader with little choice but to acknowledge the Native role in determining the nature of both colonial America and the Early Republic. The bulk of the text focuses on military and diplomatic disputes, notably the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and relations between Native societies and the fledgling United States. The third part of the book, covering Washington’s interactions with Native peoples during his presidency, is the most compelling. While there are plenty of works attesting to the role of Native peoples in early American military conflicts, their diplomatic importance during the Early Republic often receives less scholarly attention. Calloway illustrates how Washington had to treat with Native dignitaries as representatives of “foreign nations rather than domestic subjects” (2). The reader gets a clear sense of the power that peoples such as the Creek, Haudenosaunee, and Shawnee wielded and how they mounted a genuine challenge to American expansionist aims. Calloway also highlights the ingenuity and skill of Native leaders such as Red Jacket, Alexander McGillivray, and Joseph Brant, showing them to be Washington’s equal as tacticians, strategists, and negotiators.Although it is not his core focus, Calloway also weaves together the social and cultural worlds of Native peoples and American colonists. He evokes images of cities where “tribal delegations were a regular sight,” mingling among Euro-Americans (5). The impact of trade and cultural exchange appears throughout, as Native people bear gorgets and manufactured textiles alongside leggings and moccasins. Countless examples abound to show that Native societies adapted and experimented with the objects and ideas of the outside world, challenging popular depictions that continue to caricature Indians as anti-technological, static, and unchanging. For a nonspecialist or casual reader who might possess more stereotypical notions of Native societies, these descriptions matter.Calloway’s focus on Washington does have significant drawbacks. The author acknowledges a multipolar Indigenous world, a “continent crisscrossed by networks of kinship, exchange, and alliance,” where Washington only operated on the “peripheries” (9). However, by placing Washington at the center of the volume, the author only allows the reader to see glimpses of this world. The book shuffles from crisis to crisis, in line with Washington’s biography. Unfortunately, this leaves Native people to feature only insofar as they “shaped the life of the man who shaped the nation” (15). The result is a revolving cast of American Indian peoples and leaders, popping in and out of the historical narrative. The volume does a masterful job of demonstrating how Native peoples influenced Washington’s life and American history at every turn. However, some readers will be disappointed, and others disoriented, by the way in which Native nations and historical actors move in and out of focus.Deeply researched, richly detailed, and persuasively argued, The Indian World of George Washington is the rare work that should appeal to academics and readers of so-called popular history alike. Most notably, it may just help bring the insights of countless ethnohistorians to eyes of a broader audience.