New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America by Colin G. Calloway (review)

Book Reviews ·329 Native actions. At a time when there is a danger of a growing backlash against Native 'demands,' this book is especially relevant. Euro-Canadians who are disturbed by what might appear to be Native 'intransigence ' about land claims in disputed, mineral-rich areas such as Voisey's Bay, Labrador, are well advised to read this text. Similarly, for those Canadians to whom the confrontation at Oka was a frightening surprise, Ray's survey explains the long train ofprovocations that drove the Mohawk to armed resistance. Native concerns are also well addressed in the case of British Columbia, where disputes over the fishery and the land claims process have frayed the nerves of Natives and non-Natives alike. Remarkably, for a one-volume work, Ray has managed to survey thoroughly - in clear, direct language - the major contours of Inuit, Indian, and Metis history. Chronologically, the work is balanced, beginning with a brief treatment of pre-contact Canada and ending with an extended and enlightening treatment ofthe Delgamuukw (1991) case in which Chief Justice Allan McEachern of the British Columbia Supreme Court disallowed almost all the oral tradition painstakingly provided over the months by Gitskan and Wet'suweten hereditary chiefs and elders. The resulting decision, which concluded that 'aboriginal interests did not include ownership or jurisdiction over the territory ' (364), ran against the direction of the overwhelming majority of the historical and anthropological scholarship of the past thirty years. Ray's text is a useful corrective to the sort ofthinking exemplified by the Delgamuukw decision, and one hopes it will find a wide audience. Although the colour plates are beautiful and the maps clear and relevant , too many ofthe small black-and-white photographs are murky. As well, the book's usefulness for academics would be enhanced by a more comprehensive bibliography. Because only a selection of booklength entries is provided, much of the recent anthropological and archaeological literature, which is in the form of journal articles, is excluded. RALPH PASTORE Memorial University of Newfoundland New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. COLIN G. CALLOWAY. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1997· Pp. xxi, 229, illus. $24.95 The 'brave new world' that millions of immigrants were looking for when they came to the Americas after 1492 was a goal that fragmented into the multiplicity of national worlds that today makes up the West- 330 The Canadian Historical Review ern Hemisphere. Although the basic experience throughout the two American continents and the Caribbean was similar - that of Europeans taking over from indigenous Amerindian populations - the result has been a kaleidoscope of nations at least as individualistic as the replaced Amerindian societies. Instead of a new Europe overseas, what emerged were new American nation-states, each with its own distinctive identity. If they all speak European languages - the majority Spanish, but also English, Portuguese, and French - this feature does not reflect their national characteristics, which vary from each other even as they differ from their European models. In all these nationstates , indigenous Americans have left their imprint, to a greater or lesser degree. In his detailed account of this process in the United States, Colin Calloway points to the active interaction that marked early relations between immigrants and indigenous peoples: although the original English settlers came with the idea of creating a new and better England, what in fact emerged was a mixed society that became a new nation. As Calloway observes, 'Human influences were as important as environmental ones in shaping the new America' (3). In spite of attempts to squeeze them out of the picture, 'Indian ways of life remained a part of the national experience' (196). In the beginning that was not always the case; in fact, quite the opposite occurred at the outbreak of the American War of Independence , when colonists sought the support, or at least the neutrality, of Native Americans by assuring them that Americans and Indians were 'as one people, and have but one heart.' As Calloway sees it, this was 'council-fire rhetoric'; most of the founding fathers, he continues, were interested in Indian land; not in a shared Indian identity' (1). Amerindians were aware of...