The Search for a Modus Vivendi between Amerindians and Euro-North Americans

TheSearchfor aModus Vivendi between Amerindiansand Euro-North Americans R.David Edmunds. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, J983. 260+xii pp. R.David Edmunds. Tecumseh and the Quest ior!ndian Leadership. Boston: Little Brown, 1984.246 + viiipp. Isabel Thompson Kelsay.Joseph Brant /743-1807, Man of Two Worlds. Svracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984. 775+ xiipp. LG.Moses.The Indian Marz. A Biography of JamesMooney. Urbana: University of Iilino1s Press, 1984.293 + xvii pp. Raymond Wilson. Oh(vesa: Charles Eastman, SanteeSioux. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.219 + xii pp. Olive Patricia Dickason Theunderlying "reality" of the confrontation between the civilization of the Americasand that of Western Europe is not easy to identify. The confrontation itself was diffused through time and space, occurring during the course of at leasta millennium between countless individuals and myriads of places scatteredthroughout the Western Hemisphere. Each incident was as individual asthegeography, circumstances and persons involved combined to make it. Yetconsidered together and in context, these separate incidents coalesce to formlarger interlocking patterns, which in turn recombine into still larger patterns, until the characters of the civilizations themselves appear. In the finalanalysis, while each encounter was between individuals, it was the two civilizationsthey represented which largely determined the course of events. Thisphenomenon is illustrated, in encapsulated form, in the biographies beingconsidered here. All five subjects, four from Amerindian stock and onethe son of Irish immigrants, are well known to ethnohistorians, and came fromregions which today are included in the United States. They lived out theirdays within a two-hundred-year span, from the 1740suntil the 1940s,a periodwhich saw the submergence of Amerindian societies, sometimes begun byconquest, but always completed by the flood of European immigration. Each of the five men was concerned, albeit in a different way, with the Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1986, 459-467 460 Olive PatriciaDickason consequences of the European takeover of the Americas. For them, identifying common ground between their different societies proved to be difficultenough~ strategies utilizing those commonalities to arrive at a reasonably satisfactory modus vivendi were positively elusive. The takeover had been under way in the eastern U.S. for a century anda half by the time Thayendanegea, more generally known as Joseph Brant (1743-1807), was born to the Mohawk. His people were the easternmost of the Five Nations (Iroquois), the League whose lands were situated southof the St. Lawrence Valley and Lake Ontario, stretching from the Hudson River on the east to the Genesee River on the west. In the metaphoric languageof the League, the Mohawk were the Keepers of the Eas~ern Door; as such, they were the first of the confederates to come into contact with Europeans. Despite their exposed position, they had been comparatively successful in coping with westward-creeping colonial settlements; but as settlers kept appearing in ever-increasing numbers, their problems were deepening. Still, it had been possible for Thayendanegea to have the advantage of a traditional Amerindian upbringing in his early childhood; but as a youth he was sent to Lebanon, Connecticut, where Rev. Eleazar Wheelock had established a school which would later, in another location, become Dartmouth College. Thayendanegea earned the high regard of the worthy cleric, a stern Calvinist; however, according to Isabel Kelsay, his English was not of a high standard. Despite that fact, Thayendanegea began his working life as an-interpreter. becoming a war chief in alliance with the English during the American War of Independence. He would eventually change from being Britain's man to being his own, and even to being critical of the British. He never realized his dream of uniting Amerindians to preserve their lands from white encroachments , any more than he was able to win British recognition of his people's independence. In the end, when asked whose way, Amerindian or white, led to the better life, he came out in favor of his own: among us, we have no law but that written on the heart of every rational creature by the immediate finger of the great Spirit of the universe himself. We have no prisons-we haveno pompous parade of courts; and yet judges are as highly esteemed among us, as they...