The Great Encounter: Native Peoples and European Settlers in the Americas, 1492-1800 (review)

Sokolow makes breathtaking claims for this very small book tackling a vast subject. He promises to answer ten large questions that range from the spiritual and material foundations of native cultures before the arrival of Europeans, through European invaders' motives, native responses, the value of the Americas to Europe's empires, and on to lessons to be learned about our own times (p. xi). Attempting the impossible raises questions of judgment; failing to achieve the impossible deserves some understanding.

Under rather poetic chapter titles, this is an intriguing collage of short summaries, quotations, and vignettes that range from the Aleut to the Araucanian. Although the summaries are somewhat overheated versions of current scholarly understanding, the quotations and vignettes are usually inherently interesting, sensitive, and thought-provoking. Each piece has a single endnote that usually invites the reader to search thousands of pages in dozens of books to find the source for a quotation or statistic or to find the context for a bold one-liner. These notes serve as useful bibliographies but entirely thwart any attempt to check or challenge the author's evidence. Those who weary of this disparate and depressing scrapbook of European sins and Amerindian miseries can revive their interest by turning to Sokolow's clear and opinionated conclusion.

The Amerindians in Sokolow's catalog are curious, friendly, tolerant, and wise; they get all the best lines. Their cultures and languages were rich, their communal values noble, their ecological prescience profound, and their human sacrifices had deep cultural significance. A lone undocumented paragraph interrupts this celebration with a belated reminder that not "every warrior was a noble savage and a sage and every woman a healer and font of ancestral wisdom" (p. 233 ). The author has trouble empowering his noble victims and does so by charting their recovery of cultural exclusivity in centuries beyond his title, rather than their exemplary record for multicultural and multiracial exogamy.

Sokolow's Christian Europeans, on the other hand, are greedy, bigoted, and ethnocentric tribesmen who created "the world's first global capitalist economies" (p. 88 ). Many will be surprised to learn that by 1642 "England had become the greatest industrial power in Europe" (p. 165 ); more will join Sokolow in believing that this was an inherently evil development. Sokolow shares the "American holocaust" view that, within the first century of contact, 90 percent of Amerindians were killed by microbes "as predatory and opportunistic as Christians" (p. 90 ). Later he attributes precisely the same death toll to a combination of "European diseases, warfare, slavery, cruelty, starvation, and dislocation" (p. 227 ). All of the Americas did not repeat Hispaniola's demographic disaster, and neither Amerindians nor Europeans could have been expected to understand the epidemiology that Sokolow does not explain adequately. Did those Europeans who intended to exploit Amerindian labor, as well as their lands, welcome these pandemics? Surely the worst European sin (and there were a great many) was not their coming to America five centuries too soon to know what we now know, or think what we now think, about salvation, disease, ecology, or human rights.

All readers, and especially teachers in search of unusual "sound bites" that reveal European misdeeds in America, will find some new and arresting material in this book. The author was provoked to assemble this work by inadequate and distorted "traditional textbooks" that marginalized Amerindians while reverently chronicling the transit of European civilization into a savage America. Such texts are approaching well-deserved extinction. One hopes that Sokolow's audience will include those who were subjected to such distortions and now seek a strong antidote.