A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America.

A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. By Nancy Shoemaker. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 211. $29.95, ISBN 0-19-516792-9.)

In seeking to reverse the presumption that conflict and difference fundamentally defined European-Indian contacts, Nancy Shoemaker's A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America illuminates a fascinating paradox: that Indians and Europeans initially viewed themselves and the world around them in strikingly similar ways, but by the end of the eighteenth century they had together created a "fiction of irresolute difference," codified in racial terms of "red" and "white" (p. 11). Shoemaker explores how ideas, stereotypes, and myths about seemingly inherent differences between Indians and Europeans grew out of a world of commonalities. She offers deep readings of the documentary records of hundreds of Indian speeches from council proceedings with the British and to a lesser degree with the French and Spanish to explore first what ideals and worldviews Indians and Europeans had in common. She then shows how over time they consciously and unconsciously looked past those similarities to cast themselves as quite distinct from one another. The key for Shoemaker is to explore what Europeans and Indians said to one another, because she believes that it is in their dialogue that they most clearly voiced their perceptions of themselves and of each other.

Shoemaker has chosen the eighteenth century (roughly 1700 to the late 1760s) as her focus because diplomatic negotiations had become such regular occurrences as to offer a rich selection of sources, particularly for the "intense period of treaty making and treaty record keeping." She trains her eye along the region encompassing "both sides of the Appalachian mountain chain from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico" where international rivalries, networks of trade and alliance, and migrations of multiple peoples came together (p. 11). Thus French, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and Spaniards join the British on the European side of the analytical equation. Shawnees, Mahicans, Mohegans, Miamis, Creeks, Natchez, Yuchis, Catawbas, Chickasaws, and many others join Britain's two most powerful native allies, the Iroquois and Cherokee, on the Indian side.

Within this framework, Shoemaker explores six key areas of analysis: perceptions of land and how humans mark their boundaries upon it; concepts of rulership, hierarchy, and the body politic; forms and rituals of oral and written communication; definitions and objectives of alliance; gender; and metaphors of body parts eventually linking skin color to ideas of race. Within each of these topics she examines how both Indians and Europeans "turned the most basic, concrete, experiential aspects of daily life into metaphorical building blocks upon which to create abstract knowledge." This "cognitive tool kit" was the basis for shared ways of understanding and explaining their respective worlds as revealed in cross-cultural conversations (p. 3).

None of this is to suggest that similarities negated cultural distinctiveness. Europeans and Indians did not always recognize commonalities or find ways to use shared perceptions to communicate with one another. Moreover, as the century progressed, similarities led "them to see their differences in sharper relief and, over the course of the eighteenth century, construct new identities that exaggerated the contrasts between them while ignoring what they had in common" (p. 3). Most significantly, increasing competition for land gave both Indians and Europeans fewer and fewer reasons to recognize commonalities. In councils where no economic or political common ground could be found, conversations highlighted emerging beliefs about ideological and cultural differences in order to justify or explain the material conflicts that divided them. In lucid prose, blessedly free of jargon, Shoemaker thus argues convincingly that ideas and categories of race did not originate out of mindless hatred or immediate misunderstanding but appeared only after divisions over territory and sovereignty had become intractable. Difference did not breed conflict; conflict bred difference.

University of Florida 

JULIANA BARR