American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (review)

This is an exasperating book. It examines big, compelling themes, but comes off as reductionist, pedantic, and occasionally silly. Seed begins with what she considers a stark contrast between current North American and Ibero-American indigenous-rights concerns. In the former British colonies, land rights preoccupy most indigenous groups. In Latin America, human rights and subsoil resource issues predominate. Seed finds beneath this apparent modern dichotomy what she calls an American, or more appropriately, "colonial" pentimento, an unacknowledged bleeding through of English and Iberian imperial legacies.

Since American Pentimento is not classified by the publisher as "history" but as "American Studies/Native American Studies," one might expect an innovative interdisciplinary methodology, perhaps combining historical, literary, ethnographic, or other approaches. Instead, Seed treats her subject in a narrow, philological way. The focus is not native America at all, but rather colonized America's European pedigree.

The result is a series of loosely connected chapters on land use, labor, and courtly hunting in old England, tributary regimes and mining in medieval Iberia, and, finally, the moral dilemmas posed by cannibalism in the early Euro-American encounter. There is a seemingly appended Brazil chapter, but even this one focuses on Europeans rather than Native Americans. The basic point of the book, driven home ad nauseum, is that the British came to the Americas obsessed with land, whereas Iberians came obsessed with precious metals and, to a lesser extent, social dominance (it seems not to matter to Seed that the Spanish actually found gold, silver, and urban societies, and did so early, with a mandate from the pope). Native peoples, meanwhile, have apparently done little but react to these distinctive "modes of dispossession" for 500 years.

Seed's semantic method is occasionally instructive. Discussions of the Arabic origin of Latin American mineral "patrimony" and tribute systems are valuable and learned. At one level, this analysis is adequate, but when made to explain apparent long-term continuities, it fails to convince. In every chapter, the author isolates a single causal factor for some persistent pattern, like the myth of the North American Indian hunter, and inflates its importance to the exclusion of all others. The result, as in Seed's Ceremonies of Possession (New York, 1995), which this book closely resembles, is a cluster of highly exaggerated contrasts. Evidence for the rigid, protonational European mentalities said to produce these differences is largely derived from legalistic writings, with little emphasis on, for example, colonial social history. Native agency is completely ignored.

There is no doubt a kernel of truth at the core of each chapter, but at times Seed's conclusions become so absurd as to be offensive: "Indians not identifiable by native dress in present-day Spanish America are marked off by their speech accents. They are also separated by their lack of educated speech and correct Spanish grammar." "In contrast, in the United States today, natives wear the same clothes as other citizens and speak in the same accents as others in their regions.... Native Americans live in segregated communities—called reservations—and in Native American urban ghettos" (177). One need not be a Native American to regard these statements as evidence of the taxonomic urge gone haywire.

There are also enough factual errors to render this book useless for instructors of Native American or American Studies. The Andean vicuña is not a pack animal, to pick one of a dozen examples, and cannibalism most certainly did not play "a significant role in Inca society" (122). Most egregiously misleading is the claim that all native Brazilians were hunter-gatherers when the Portuguese arrived.

The most serious errors in American Pentimento are not factual, however, but methodological (or logical). Comparative history is reduced to an archaeology of contrasting essentialisms that Seed offers as the causes of today's predicaments. Monocausal explanations for complex social...