The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 by Jace Weaver (review)

“My purpose,” Jace Weaver announces at the beginning of his sweeping interdisciplinary study The Red Atlantic, “is to restore Indians and Inuit to the Atlantic world and demonstrate their centrality to that world, a position equally important to, if not more important than, the Africans of [Paul] Gilroy’s black Atlantic” (x). That is a tall order. Neither modernity nor the geography of racial identity looked the same after The Black Atlantic was published in 1993. And already, some readers might be wondering, why describe the goal of defining a Red Atlantic in this manner, when (in part thanks to Gilroy) the multiracial Atlantic is the starting point for leading scholarship today and when the sort of race competition that this sentence implies surely works against the purpose of fighting racialization? This ambitious book is meant to ignite conversations, to be sure, but that is only one of its goals. I think it will accomplish many of them.

“Native resources, ideas, and peoples themselves,” Weaver sets out to show, “traveled the Atlantic with regularity and became among the most basic defining components of Atlantic cultural exchange” (17). The chapters that pursue this objective are, with one exception, structured not chronologically but according to overlapping and substantive status or role categories in Atlantic exchanges. They are told in a swashbuckling style, often in the form of renarrations of major colonization events using a native-centric lens. Weaver first offers a survey of the thousands of indigenous American captives, slaves, and prisoners who labored and suffered under colonization, then complicates this story with a chapter on various forms of servitude, emphasizing military and nautical service. A chapter on native diplomacy is followed by one on celebrity, which was often the attendant of the foregoing categories. Natives, of course, were everywhere and always. Even if you were convinced of that already, however, you will find yourself from time to time surprised and informed by Weaver’s epic panorama. American wealth revitalized Europe; indigenous technologies and agricultural products transformed the world’s senses and sensibilities; indigenous alliances were not just integral to European political transformations but in the colonies were their very medium for centuries; and indigenous languages, morés, arts, and cosmologies forever altered the development of European sciences, philosophy, and religion. Particularly thoughtful are the book’s recoveries of the indigenous contexts of the black and Wampanoag whaler and shipping magnate Paul Cuffe, its reading of the Mohawk Louis Jackson’s account of his tribe’s boatmen on the Nile in 1885, and its speculations about the peripatetic life of the Apache Paul Teenah. The slender threads of evidence left to us of the last, as he moved from internment at Fort Marion to Carlisle to the US military, serve to illustrate one of Weaver’s methodological observations about the Red Atlantic archives: “Questions outnumber answers” (118). (Certainly—although one wonders, why not pull on the equally slender thread of the story of Teenah’s wife, speculation about which would add depth to the otherwise male-heavy first half of The Red Atlantic?)

The book’s fifth chapter will ostensibly be of most interest to the readers of this journal, as it treats literary representations of indigenous people by both natives and nonnatives. It was while reading The Female American (1767), Weaver tells us, that he began to rethink Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. Its author unknown (though there have been interesting recent speculations), this novel opens the Pandora’s Box of Atlantic colonialism and racial identification, as its heroine, “the hybrid progeny of America and Europe,” Weaver writes, “recrosses the Red Atlantic bearing civilization” to “finish the incomplete project of colonialism” (237). In this chapter Weaver posits a canon revision: to explore the Red Atlantic as a function of the European imagination, we might turn to The Female American, not Robinson Crusoe (1719); to Voltaire’s L’Ingenu (1767), not his Candide...