New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America.

New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. By Colin G. Calloway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xxi plus 229pp.).

Nearly half a century ago, Bernard De Voto made a passionate plea to change the story line of American history that dismisses Native Americans as little more than a hindrance to the course of progress. "American history," he wrote, "has been written as if history were a function solely of white culture--in spite of the fact that till well into the nineteenth century the Indians were one of the principal determinants of historical events." A distinguished writer of books on the American West, De Voto charged that "American historians have made shockingly little effort to understand the life, the societies, the cultures, the thinking, and the feeling of the Indians, and disastrously little effort to understand how all of these affected white men and their societies." [1] Colin G. Calloway's scholarship over the past several decades has answered De Voto's call for change. In this, his latest book, he has done more. By mining a rich vein of precious ore, representing the work of scores of Indian historians, anthr opologists, linguists, archaeologists, agronomists, and other scholars, he has constructed a primer on the myriad ways in which European colonizers were Indianized and Indians were Europeanized over two centuries of continuous contact in North America. By canvassing the entire North American continent--necessarily incorporating French-Indian, Dutch-Indian, and Spanish-Indian as well as Anglo-Indian contacts-Calloway has struck a useful blow in a campaign to treat the colonial period as something more than a preview of the emerging the nation state.

It has proved very difficult to get generalists to listen to the specialists who work in areas such as Indian history, as James Merrell, James Axtell, Daniel Richter, and Fred Hoxie have been reminded us in detailed examinations of the textbooks that young Americans grow upon. Painfully slow that it is, progress is being made on this, and Calloway's book should help. The sheer amount of new work he has surveyed in this admirable synthesis is staggering. Weaving threads from his own research into this rich fabric, he provides sparkling chapters, organized topically, on how cross-cultural contacts produced new ways of living (and dying) in areas such as warfare and diplomacy, the ideology and practice of religion, disease and medicine, trade and material culture, sex and family formation. A choice sentence that Calloway uses from the anthropologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price at the beginning of the book sums up his message: "New World it is, for those who became its peoples remade it, and in the proces s, they remade themselves."

In concentrating on Indian-European cultural interaction and cultural fusion, Calloway indulges in a certain artificiality. The sentence quoted above from Mintz and Price refers to the merging and melding of African and European cultural attributes. However, Calloway leaves Africans out of the New World equation. This can be justified by his purpose of showing the myriad ways in which Native Americans and Europeans mingled, merged, and married. But it carries a certain penalty--like studying two lines of an isosceles triangle. The penalty is severe when such topics as racial intemingling come under scrutiny. Native Americans, in fact, married and produced mixed-race children with Africans far more than with Europeans, but the unsuspecting reader of this book would not know this.

Calloway is silent on some topics that had enormous effects on how Indian societies changed through living along porous boundaries with European settlers. Perhaps the most important is alcohol--a vital trade item not mentioned in his discussion of dietary changes in Indian societies or in his treatment of the fur trade. Political influences, running in one or both directions between Europeans and Native Americans, is another area that he ignores. Perhaps this may be explained by a distaste for the arguments of Iroquois nationalists who make large claims about the influence of Iroquois confederation on American constitutional thinking. But whatever one's position on this on-going argument, there is little dispute that Indian political organization and practice changed as a result of trade, war, and alliance with Europeans.

Withal, this is an important book, one that lends itself well to undergraduate courses in Early American as well as Indian history. It should be mandatory reading for those in the corridors of politics and public discourse who argue that multicultural studies are subversive to the common good.

University of California, Los Angles

ENDNOTE 

(1.) De Voto, Introduction to John Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire (Toronto, 1965), 15-16.