The Best Poor Man's Country As Middle Ground? Mainstreaming Indians in Early American Studies

It has been a quarter century since Gary B. Nash’s Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1973) launched what proved to a fundamental shift in early American historiography. Drawing on the still very “new” social history, new approaches to colonial slavery, and a far less developed historical literature on American Indians, Nash articulated a vision of early America as fundamentally fractured along lines of color and race as well as class. From their, at best, marginal presence in conventional histories, Africans and Native Americans emerged as central, forceful players on the historical stage whether devising strategies for maintaining political or cultural autonomy, sustaining one or another form of resistance, or enduring the humiliations and despair of defeat and oppression.

If the “red” component of Nash’s tripartite portrait was supported by a less robust historiography than the other two, that deficiency began to be addressed two years later with the appearance of Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975). Like Nash, Jennings boldly proclaimed his revisionist intentions in his title, and was even less temperate in stating his argument. Whereas Nash understood intercultural relations as embedded in historic processes and ideologies as necessary byproducts of these processes, Jennings had little patience with process and even less with ideology. He regarded the constructions of “civilized” and “savage,” by which Europeans conventionally distinguished themselves from Indians as the crude means by which historical actors (with the support of modern scholars) disguised their greed, lust for power, theft, and mass murder.

During the time since Nash and Jennings published, the scholarship on Native peoples in early America has veritably exploded. Historians and historically-minded anthropologists have uncovered and analyzed with great skill a wide range of evidence relating to trade, war, religious missions, diplomacy, legal subjugation, expropriations of land, and demographic, political and cultural change as experienced by Indians interacting with Europeans and Africans. The central thrust of this work has been to balance what might be called the “Euro-colonist” perspective informing conventional scholarship by pointing to Indians’ agency in shaping the history through which they lived and to Indians’ own understandings of that history.

While we historians have come far in our understanding of how Indians experienced early American history and shaped their relations with non-Indians, the implications of our findings for our view of early America as a whole are less clear. We have developed a heightened awareness of the subtlety and extent of the material and “mental” exchanges occurring in cross-cultural encounters. We have noted that such encounters often took place on relatively level “middle grounds” and were sometimes sustained for decades, perhaps even a century or more, at a time. We understand that neither Indians themselves, nor their understanding of themselves as Indians, nor their ability to shape their lives in straitened circumstances ever “vanished,” despite what mythologists and scholars have claimed since the seventeenth century. Yet for all the complexity we now discern and describe, our Indians remain—in the larger historiographical scheme of things—little more than the obstacles to an inevitable Anglo-American expansion and conquest depicted by earlier historians.

The question that only a few scholars have yet asked is whether the historical role played by Indians was larger than the sum total of their direct relations with non-Indians and the tangible consequences of those relations. Are there ways we can say that Indians “made” American history writ large, as opposed to the history of New England in one period, the Ohio Valley in another, and the Plains in yet a third? Fortunately, Colin Calloway, one of the most prolific scholars of Native American history, devotes his latest book to just this question.

Calloway signals his intentions through his title. Following James Merrell, he maintains that the wholesale transformations—ecological, demographic, political...