An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America

Part I. Discovery

PART I Discovery This book begins with a simple premise, that it is possible to write a history of Native North America in the seventeenth century. Of course, any history of Native peoples during this time period must also be a history of the encounter between the indigenous peoples of this continent and the European empires that brought settler colonialism to the Western Hemisphere . And so one might expect that this Native history of North America is also a book about the discovery of the New World. The idea that Europe “discovered” the Americas is obviously flawed as a historical concept. The two continents existed before Europeans arrived and began to interact with the peoples they found living there. From a European perspective, however, the Americas were a New World because they had been conspicuously absent from the Old World that they had known for millennia . This place and its people were not in the sacred texts and origin stories of Europe, Asia, or Africa. They were absent from maps, and even from the historical imagination. Given this absence, it makes sense that colonists thought of this place as a New World even though it was occupied by people who had a long history in the Western Hemisphere.1 It also makes sense that they relied on a language of discovery to describe their experiences in a place so completely unknown to them. These are the biases that encode virtually all of the textual evidence that historians must rely on to write the history of seventeenth-century North America. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that narratives of discovery, as historical artifacts, actually teach us about the writer rather then the New World. What we witness is not the discovery of The Other—be it place, person, or thing—but rather the experience of the author confronting a radically different world. It is that experience, that confrontation with the unknown that the writers describe.2 The discovery of the New World, in other words, was a discursive act. Europeans used the tools at their disposal—particularly written narrative and cartography —to reveal this unknown world to the peoples of Europe. These texts were an attempt at translation. They described and labeled the New World so that it could be observed, understood, and ultimately possessed by the peoples of the Old World. “The ritual of possession,” Greenblatt argues, “though it is apparently directed toward the natives, has its full meaning then in relation to other European powers when they come to hear of the discovery.”3 In this way narratives of discovery and claims of possession went hand in hand. 26 Discovery Thus, much of what Europeans had to say about the New World had nothing to do with the reality on the ground, but rather was directed toward a European audience. The English, French, and Spanish Empires, for example, all claimed possession of vast territories in North America by right of discovery . This was particularly true for the French Empire. With a small number of settlements situated along the bank of the Saint Lawrence River, the colony of New France laid claim to territory stretching deep into the interior and encompassing the regions we now think of as the Great Lakes and the northern Great Plains. In reality, European colonies in seventeenth-century North America consisted of a small number of settlements on the east coast, except for Spain, which controlled the former territory of the Aztecs at the southern tip of the continent. The vast interior of North America remained indigenous. The empires of Europe could, at times, influence the peoples and events in the interior, but most of the continent lay beyond their control, even beyond their comprehension. To dismiss the idea of discovery as mere political fiction, however, leaves untold a crucial part of the epic story of encounter that defined the early modern world. The New World was, in effect, created through a process of mutual discovery. Just as European empires confronted the implications of discovering a New World, indigenous social formations like the Anishinaabeg were forced to comprehend and incorporate new peoples, animals, tools, weapons, and countless other material artifacts into their social world. In North America these adjustments altered the social relations of production by which human communities sustained themselves. But this encounter had the same effect on the peoples of Europe and Africa. Increasingly, the people, things, and ideas that circulated between their...