Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History (review)

Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History. By Roger L. Nichols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xvii + 383 pp., acknowledgments, maps and plates, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

This work begs the questions: What is historical comparison and what historiographical results can be expected from such efforts? Historian Roger Nichols takes the full portion of five centuries and all peoples of North America, geographically from the Spanish Main including Mexico to the Arctic, all of which confounds simplification and increasingly demands more detail and analysis at almost every point. Nichols succinctly articulates his goals and methods and the central questions that guided the construction of his survey, and he reiterates them frequently. However, the level of understanding that is needed of more than one society and its political culture, both in terms of issues and historiography, often increases exponentially, especially in cases of cross-cultural applications in which ethnographic control cannot be over emphasized. Nichols acknowledges this in his understatement that “the story of Indian affairs in the United States and Canada includes an overwhelming amount and variety of data” (xv).

Distinguishing “pre-modern” from “modern” eras, Nichols relegates to the former “the events of a series of frontier encounters” (1513 to the 1860s) that are arranged into alternating opening chapters about the interactions of the two predominant colonial regimes, treated as emerging nation-states, and their relations with indigenous peoples, which throughout are referred to more specifically as Indians, Metis and Inuit or Eskimo. Brief treatment is accorded the Spanish and the Dutch empires and only as influences on the imperial designs of the French and English. Nichols accomplishes the shift to the “modern” in his chapters “striving for independence” concerning the periods 1750 to 1795 and 1795–1820s, which are his finest chapters demonstrating his comparative skills. Throughout Nichols attempts to incorporate emerging historiographical concerns. From alternative views of Indian demands for fur trade markets and influences arising amid gender relations to the problems of refugees and the scale of their incorporations that faced Indians and non-Indians by emerging nation-states and their interests, Nichols’s treatment is both social/intellectual and diplomatic/military/institutional history. Nativistic movements among Indians either prompted or reacted to later utopian experiments among whites amid pressures for accommodation and cooperation between white and Indian neighbors. Nichols asserts that the era between the Seven Years (or French and Indian War) and the War of 1812 “for native peoples in both countries . . . brought fundamental changes in politics, economics, diplomacy, and society” (150).

The next four decades of the nineteenth century become forthrightly the era of modernity epitomized by Indian struggles for cultural persistence weighed against the demographic reality of physical retreat into enclaves as indigenous populations were overwhelmed by settler and immigrant ones. Nichols notes that while the “pioneer actions and government programs” were similar, the bitter contest for land and its resources between immigrants/settlers and tribal societies was driven by the economic competition of agriculture/horticulture and resulted in violence. The Canadian context did not prompt the massive forced removals of thousands of Indians farther west as was the American case in this very period. Indian affairs policy was relegated to the margins in the two countries in that it was a servant to the policies of western expansion and national development. The early programs of acculturation revealed the contradictions of cultural genocide meeting various negotiated pragmatic accommodations. For example, the purposes of the reserve/reservation as an institution emerged from the same template that informed the policies of young United States and longer established colonial British North America. Land grabbing, whether by treaty or other means, prevailed in both jurisdictions. The promotion of assimilation was undermined by the segregation required by reserves/reservations (212).

Contrasts between the course of events and outcomes in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century United States and Canadian confrontations with Indians...