Frederic Baraga's Short History of the North American Indians (review)

The title of this book leads the reader to think that it covers the history of all Indians in North America, but it does not. The information is generalized observations of the Indian situation in America in the early nineteenth century with more specific details about Algonquian Indians living in and around the Great Lakes area of what is now Canada and the United States. There is not a wealth of historical information herein. The first forty-five pages of the book are Graham MacDonald's introduction to Frederic Baraga's text, and, in fact, the biographical information about Baraga is more interesting than Baraga's words. Further, MacDonald contextualizes Baraga's writing by offering the historical, social, political, and religious background.

Baraga was a Roman Catholic priest from Bavaria who became a missionary to the Indians of the Great Lakes area from 1831 until his death in 1868. This was a time of transition for the Indians in the area. The Revolutionary War was over; the Indians of the Northeast had been subdued and decimated through disease and warfare, and many of them had been pushed west where they came into conflict with the tribes already resident in the area and those further west. Fur-bearing animals of the region were almost eliminated and without the financial resources from the fur trade, the Indians of the area were poverty-stricken, hopeless, and succumbing rapidly to alcoholism, starvation, and more disease. Not surprisingly, Baraga believed that these Indians were doomed to disappear. He wrote: 'According to all probabilities, in a few centuries the history of these Indians will be that of a people that exist only in books.' He was interested, not in saving their lives, but in making what remained of their lives as comfortable as possible while saving their souls.

Baraga seems clinical and cold in his analysis of why the Indians were 'disappearing.' His reasons are accurate – disease, warfare, and alcoholism – but he doesn't comment on the morality of white invasion and colonialism that created these situations. Rather, it seems that he accepts the plight of the Indians as being inevitable – Manifest Destiny, a term that would not be invented for some decades, but was already present in the attitudes of white European settlers.

Moreover, Baraga's writing is full of the prejudices of his time. For example, he uses the civilization-savage dichotomy throughout his text, and while MacDonald pleads that many writers of the time period were aware of the prejudice implicit in such statements, this reader sees no evidence that Baraga was aware of such problematical language. There are also inconsistencies in Baraga's statements. At one point, he writes: 'Indians are in general lazy,' and yet, he goes on to comment about the remarkable persistence and endurance of Indians when they are hunting. His puzzlement over this situation and other similar ones indicates that while he was dedicated to helping Indians in both secular and sacred settings, he was unable to bridge the gap in cultural understanding.

Baraga wrote this book in an abbreviated form as a report to his European supporters, but expanded and revised it over the years. This was not his only publication. Baraga was a prolific writer, producing a variety of writing that included instruction books for good Christian living and Ojibwa language grammars and dictionaries. His Short History of the North American Indians was first published in 1837 in both German and French. This current edition is the first time the work has been translated into English. MacDonald's contribution is meticulously researched with high standards of writing. This latest book should be of value to anyone interested in the story of white/Indian contact in the Great Lakes region during the first half of the nineteenth century. Serious researchers may find the text useful for the descriptions of Indian clothing, for example, but should beware of accepting as fact Baraga's...