The Barnes & Noble Review
James Wilson notes that the first contact between Native people and explorers was friendly. In the 16th century, up and down the Eastern seaboard, French, Dutch, English, and Spanish boats landed, and were most often greeted by Natives bearing gifts of welcome. The beaver and fox pelts they offered became popular with the Europeans, and a profitable and congenial trade relationship was established, one that would last for a hundred years.
What was it that turned the relationship sour? Wilson details several factors that influenced Euro-Indian relations. For one thing, the religious fervor and military might that had driven the Crusades was looking for a new outlet. The "savages" of the New World seemed a likely target — like the Muslims of Europe, they had a religion and cultural practices that made them the Other, and the Holy Wars had heightened Christian Europeans' fear of the Other.
There were also the mercenary aims of the explorers and their investors. Not content to simply trade with the peoples of the New World, it became their goal to establish colonies, and thereby ownership of hunks of the land. This was an alien concept to Native Americans, who saw themselves as part of their environment and notasrulers of it. In American Indian culture, there was no drive to subjugate the earth; instead, the earth was treated with respect, cultivated enough to feed the Indians and no more. Explorers saw this as laziness; they couldn't understand why the Indians wouldn't grow as much produce as possible in order to sell it for a profit. But the idea of exploiting the land until it was dried up and barren was not only alien to Native Americans, it would have gone against their religious beliefs.
Wilson details the very different creation myths of the Europeans and the Indians, and why these myths set up a dichotomy between the two groups that could never be resolved. In the Judeo-Christian religion, man is expelled from Eden and condemned to subduing and exploiting the land for his survival. But for the Indians, there was no such expulsion. "In Native American stories, human beings are seen as an integral part of a 'natural' order which embraces the whole of creation.... Their destiny is not to change [the land] or move away from it but to maintain it according to the instructions they received 'long ago' from their creator or culture hero." Furthermore, tribes were used to more or less peacefully coexisting alongside other tribes with creation myths were different from their own. They believed that each tribe had its own unique relation to the land and therefore its own stories. When the Europeans came, the Indians had no problem living beside them in peace, though their beliefs were very different from their own. The Europeans, however, believed in the rightness of their religion, and if they were right, the Indians must be wrong.
Because of these wildly differing cultures, it took the Indians many years to understand why the white men often attacked them without any apparent provocation. During that time, those Natives who were not wiped out by European diseases, particularly smallpox, to which they had no resistance, were attacked, tortured, and killed in the name of the Christian God. The Indians' unfamiliar rites, as well as their unwillingness to farm the land to its greatest capacity, convinced the European invaders that they had a right to take the land and convert the Natives. That the Natives had no interest in being converted or in changing their way of life was of little interest to them.
The persecution of the Indians in New England would set the tone for treatment of Natives across the country. As westward expansion began, Native Americans were pushed further and further west, and their populations dwindled. As with species of birds and animals, the near-extinction of the American Indian brought with it the late lamentations of European-Americans, who then began to mythologize the nearly extinct people. The Native American warrior-hero has of late been replaced in the public imagination by the natural, mystical Native American, but neither stereotype tells us much about what it is like to be a Native American living in America today.
In his lively and thought-provoking book, James Wilson has compiled a staggering number of stories that make up the history of the Native Americans. Along the way, he has shattered many myths and even questioned the veracity of certain so-called "scientific facts." There is very little evidence, for instance, that the Indians' ancestors came to North America along the Bering Strait land bridge. It would, however, be too disruptive to Eurocentrism for us to believe that humans might have evolved in different places in the world. There is also evidence that there were many more than the conservatively estimated 2 million Natives before Europeans arrived; the smaller the number, however, the more easily assuaged the guilt we share in having wiped them out, and the more easily we can believe the lie that the land was really just ours for the taking.
—Gail Jaitin
...[A] useful introduction to a rich subject....The wilyshapeshiftingcontradictoryheroic tricksterwhom many contemporary Indians regard as the key motif of Native American culturewill surprise us again. —National Review
The litany of massacres, epidemics and forced migrations is exhausting but instructive, reminding the reader that the few famous battles that tend to be memorialized were in fact only a small part of a continent-wide effort, lasting for more than three centuries, to displace or eradicate Indian cultures. The New York Times Book Review
Employing elegiac prose and steady narrative momentum, Wilson has written a richly informative history that places Native Americans "at the center of the historical stage." Wilson, a writer for British television, interviewed American Indians across the U.S., combining oral tradition with other historical sources, ethnography and archeology. The result is an impressive work of historical synthesis that relies heavily on Native American oral traditions (Wilson makes a strong argument that these traditions are historically accurate). Although he concentrates on the period after Europeans arrived on the continent, Wilson manages to convey the diversity of flourishing Native American nations before the arrival of the English, Spanish and French. And, as he details the long centuries of trade and treaties (frequently broken by the Europeans), and the decimation of Native America by forced migration, small pox and war, Wilson never loses sight of the particularity of specific Indian cultures. One of the many absorbing story lines he follows is how Indians who attempted to assimilate, such as Cherokee slaveholders in the South, were chagrined to find their way blocked on cultural and, later, on pseudo-Darwinian racial grounds. In this account, Indians are neither a subplot in the grand story of American Manifest Destiny nor the poster children for all that is wrong and rapacious about Western Civilization: they are the protagonists of a vital, tumultuous history that continues to unfold today. (Apr.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Wilson has been actively involved with indigenous North Americans for almost 25 years. Here he presents a comprehensive, imaginative overview of Native American history that is exceptional in its concept: Wilson has gathered information not only from historical sources but from ethnographic and archaeological works as well as oral histories. He looks at social issues such as intermarriage and language loss in addition to the political and environmental issues faced by present-day Native American communities. Wilson begins with the first English settlements on the Atlantic coast in the 1500s and moves from century to century, focusing on various geographic areas through the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. He then addresses today's social, political, and economic issues while trying to examine the legacy of ignorance and misunderstanding that has reduced the Native American population from 7 to 10 million people to 250,000 in four centuries. Because it encompasses so many facets of the Native American situation, this volume will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.--Vicki Leslie Toy Smith, Univ. of Nevada, Reno
Wilson writes authoritatively and with keen insight, combining a broad range of historical, archaeological and anthropological sources with a knowledge of Indian oral traditions, the published views of contemporary Indians and the conclusions of his own interviews...All in all, this is an impressive book that deserves a wide readership.The Times Literary Supplement
A sweeping, well-written, long-view history of American Indian societies. Wilson, a British writer for television and radio documentaries, does a creditable job of interpreting the Native American past and present for his intended European readers, although he misses a few references that are familiar to Americans and has to explain a few others that we take for granted on these shores. But mostly, he gets it right—while also taking up some themes that American scholars have overlooked, especially European Enlightenment views of the "noble savage" and ideas that some unknown historical force propelled the European conquerors of America to "subdue the wilderness and supplant the `Indian"' —who, those views had it, was somehow stuck at a lower stage of cultural development than any enjoyed by the newcomers. Although he relies heavily on the work of revisionist historians, such as the Sioux scholar Vine Deloria, Wilson takes care to examine a wide range of scholarly materials (about which he offers some nicely barbed commentary); based on these sources, he reconsiders such matters as the Indian population of North America at the time of the European arrival, which he believes has been seriously underestimated in number by some millions of inhabitants. Wilson sometimes falls into confusion, as do many of his American counterparts, when dealing with such notoriously complex subjects as the fluid post-WWII status of Indian nations vis-à-vis the federal government; and he misses several important events in recent Indian news, such as the revival of the American Indian Movement in the mid-1990s. But in the main, his is a trustworthy telling of a sad epic of misunderstanding,mayhem, and massacre. .
