John Doe 

Professor Rice 

History 17A 

22 November 2002

Understanding Indian-European Relations in Colonial America 

Introduction 

            I decided to study about Native Americans in American history.  I first sought out general background information in a textbook on American history and then found articles on the subject in Dictionary of American History and The Oxford Dictionary of American History.   I immediately realized that my subject was so vast and complex that I would have to narrow down my topic.  Consequently, I chose to limit my study to the early relations between Indians and Europeans in Northeastern colonial America.  A consultation with one of the reference librarians led me to look for materials under the subjects “Indians of North America” and “United States – Civilization – Indian Influences” in the online catalog.  I next searched for important journal articles in the EBSCOhost periodicals database.  In order to understand the context of Indian-white contacts, I included a video in my bibliography.  For good measure, I used the Librarians Index to the Internet to search for quality specialized Internet sites.  My sources led me to conclude that, indeed, relations between Whites and Native Americans during the colonial and earlier national periods were much more complex than is commonly believed. 

Bibliography 

Berkhofer, James A., Jr.  “Native American and United States History,”  Comparative
        Studies in Society and History 34 (1992): 293-327. 

Berkhofer, professor of history at the University of Maine, suggests new ways to look at the relationship between the Native American past and the main course of American history.  He criticizes the traditional textbook approach in which Indians do nothing but resist.  In their colonial and nineteenth-century manifestations, they are viewed as either “obstacles to white settlement” or “victims of oppression.”  Berkhofer observes that “As victims or obstacles, Indians have no textbook existence apart from their resistance.”  In short, “texts reflect our deep-seated tendency to see whites and Indians as possessing two distinct species of historical experience” rather than possessing a mutual history of continuous interaction and influence. 

James Berkhofer describes four well-meaning but unproductive approaches to “minority” history, especially the history of Native Americans.  They are the “great man” or “heroes” approach (the “devious side of treaty-making”); the “who-is-more-civilized” approach (“barbarities committed by whites against Indians” contrasted with the “civilized” contributions of Indians); the “crushed personality” and “cultural theft” approach (“change only destroys Indian cultures, never adds to them”); and – by far the most important – the “contributions” approach (“long lists of the contributions Native Americans made to the general American way of life”).  Berkhofer believes that the first two approaches offer variations on the theme of Native American heroism and resistance.  The third presents Indians as victims.  None of the three, states Berkhofer, gives much help in analyzing processes in which both Indians and European Americans played varying and evolving roles.  The contributions approach, although flawed, is useful, according to Berkhofer.  Historians inevitably use it when they seek to define the Indian role in American history, rather than the white role in Indian history. 

This reviewer sees that a serious flaw in Berkhofer’s contributions approach is the almost exclusive focus on native material culture and names of native or American objects and places that neglects how those items were used, perceived, and adapted by their white borrowers.  More seriously, the contributions approach ignores the changes wrought in Anglo-American culture by reacting negatively and perhaps unconsciously to the Native American presence, threat, and challenge.  This is a very challenging but important scholarly article.
 

Forrest, Tuomi J.  William Penn: Visionary Proprietor.  18 September 2002 <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/PENN/pnhome.html>. 

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, Tuomi J. Forrest created an incisive look at the interaction of culture, politics, and history in Penn’s relationship with the Delaware Indians.  In his “Introduction,” Forrest presents a brief biography of Penn and his founding of the Pennsylvania colony.  Other topics include Penn’s treaty with the Delaware, his relations with Native Americans in general, and his role in the planning of the city of Philadelphia.  “Penn in the U.S. Capitol” discusses the sculpture “Penn’s Treaty with the Indians,” by Nicholas Gravelot, which is above the northern entrance of the Capitol Rotunda.  There is also a short bibliography.  According to Forrest, Penn’s relationship with Native Americans should be viewed in a specific manner.  For what Penn and his contemporaries realized, and of what most modern Americans are unaware, was the variety inherent in Indian-White relations.  By this, Forrest means that there was no uniform White colonist or standard Indian.  This site presents a mature and informed view for an academic audience.
 

Indians of the Eastern Woodlands: The Legacy of the American Indians.  Ancient American Series. Hosted by Wes Studi and narrated by Glenn Mazen.  Prod. and Dir. by Gary Warriner.  Videocassette.  Camera One, 1996.

This 60 minute color video uses a timeline to take viewers back to the last Ice Age. An archaeological site in Alabama is visited, where evidence of nomadic Archaic Indians exists. The Archaic Indians may have been predecessors of the Mound Builders. The first site that archaeologists believe had mounds is Poverty Point in Louisiana. Enhanced aerial photographs help visualize a city with streets and mounds. Even trade was evident at Poverty Point, and it may have lasted over 1000 years.  

The largest collection of mounds is found in Ohio. Here the primary focus of the video is the Hopewell culture. The video’s creators explore three large Hopewell centers as well as their trade network. The video offers a number of reasons for the construction of mounds. Some were for ceremonial or religious reasons, while others were possibly for political or economic reasons. Some were designed for astronomical purposes, and still others for burial plots. Even though the Hopewell Indians had no written language, artifacts yield much information about an organized society. They built the mounds and other earthen structures with very primitive tools. Later, they built animal-shaped effigy mounds. These shapes can only be recognized from aerial photographs. The video presents theories that explain what happened to this group of people.

This video spends its greatest amount of time on the Cahokia site. Cahokia was a true city, hand built by people who had no knowledge of the wheel. It was the center of a highly advanced civilization, known as Mississippian. From 900 to 1500 A.D. the mounds were constructed, one as high as a ten-story building. Mound construction even used different types of soil to promote proper drainage. The video’s makers advance theories about life in this prehistoric city, based on archaeological digs. It was intriguing to realize that in 1150, Cahokia had a population of 20,000. It was larger than the city of London.

I found this video to be aesthetically pleasing. The photography, narration, and music combined to effectively present the information in a meaningful way. The blending of scenery, maps, diagrams, artifacts, models, and real people was skillfully done. Using real figures that fade in and out in a ghost-like fashion created a feeling that the spirit of the Native American is still in Cahokia. It was intriguing to see how the creators of this video interjected the parallel developments of the Europeans during this time.
 

Jennings, Francis.  The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest.  Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. 

Francis Jennings, as the Director of the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, is an eminently qualified historian of colonial Indian-European relations.  Jennings’s The Invasion of America is an important contribution to American Indian studies.  He refutes the notion that colonial history of North America was a grand melodrama peopled by inflexible, animal-like Indian savages and progressive-minded Anglo-Saxon lovers of liberty.  In place of this reading, Jennings recognizes that the morality and conduct of actual historical figures cannot be explained by such stereotypes and that Indians in particular need to be viewed as fully human participants in history – not simply for the sake of justice but for the sake of accuracy.   

Invasion of America is divided into two parts.  In the first, Jennings treats the reigning assumptions regarding Indians in a sequence of topical chapters devoted to such matters as population, religion, economic exchange, political institutions, and warfare.  Each chapter first uncovers the historical and ideological roots of widely accepted distortions surrounding its topic, and then presents the author’s own perspective, one rooted in the culture concept of modern anthropology rather than the racism of an older pseudo-science.  The second part presents seventeenth-century New England as a case study in Jennings’s version of ethno history, arguing that even the most recent studies retain a conceptualization of native-settler relations developed by the “Puritan gentry” to justify its actions and policies.  From Jennings’s perspective, Indians were the victims of an imperial expansion fueled by greed and rationalized by notions of the superiority of civilized Europeans to savage Indians. 

One of Jennings’s most significant findings in Invasion was that the New England colonists did not win their decisive conflicts with the Indians, King Philip’s War (1675-76), by themselves.  Rather, they required the aid of the Mohawk Iroquois, supported by New York’s Governor Edmund Andros.  This intervention led directly, in the war’s aftermath, to the formation of the Covenant Chain system of alliances, in which the Mohawks and the other four Iroquois nations joined Andros’s efforts to impose imperial order on Britain’s northern colonies. 

Invasion, although written with professional historians in mind, is, with a little background reading, entirely within the grasp of undergraduates.  It introduces the student to the debate.
 

Swatzler, David.  A Friend Among the Senecas: the Quaker Mission to Cornplanter’s  People.
        Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000. 

This work on the Seneca Indians and the Society of Friends in the late eighteenth century mixes biography, history, and anthropology in an eclectic and peculiar way.  It features the brief journal of Quaker Henry Simmons’ mission among the Seneca but uses it mostly as a springboard for various topics, including Seneca games, clans, medicine, religion and dreams, economy, Seneca women’s roles and authority, and Handsome Lake’s reformation of Iroquois society.  But it also treats Quaker religion and culture as well as war and diplomacy between the United States and various Native Americans.  The author is commendably evenhanded, recognizing the authenticity of Quaker philanthropic motives toward the Senecas, but also the cultural limitations and myopia that Quakers shared with most Europeans.  The Seneca emerge as lamentably victimized, especially by alcohol and its vendors, but still astute promoters of their own self-interest, not overawed by European blandishments, even from Quakers.  Swatzler’s explanation of cultural clash, especially regarding economic matters, may be the best feature of the work.  The book is well written and very accessible to a wide variety of readers.