On New Worlds for All

This is a really interesting book, and I like Calloway’s sense of vision, but I think he overstates his case.

In this book, Colin Calloway argues that European contact with indigenous peoples in the Americas fundamentally reshaped both Native Americans and European settlers, causing them to become more alike. As a starting point, he argues (rightfully) that we must reframe Columbus’s expeditions as less “discovery” and more as a “connection” between two worlds. Then, he frames each chapter thematically, showing ways that American Indians and European settlers (primarily British and French, with a few Spanish cases) transformed one another in North America.

The thematic chapters include things like changes in dress, material culture, food, nomadism/settled society, medicine, religion, warfare, and diplomacy. Calloway makes a great deal of accounts by those born in Europe (especially the Spanish and French) who encounter white settlers in the American hinterlands, but mistake them for indigenous peoples due to the way they live. This is certainly interesting and it shows some acquisition of Native cultural habits; after all, canoes, moccasins, tomahawks, and beaver caps are now considered as (white) American as apple pie. Calloway is also right that indigenous doctors proliferated, as the numbers of white doctors were few (largely because they had to be educated in Europe); that white settlers began to eat more foods like beans, maize, and tomatoes; that guerrilla warfare became a common method for white settlers; and that migration across the continent by white people looked a lot like the “migratory” American Indians.

And yet, a lot of these things are not fundamentally “American,” are only surface-level, or were temporary. For example, guerrilla warfare and migration seem to be human universals making them odd arguments to include here. Indigenous foods and tools, on the other hand, have more sense to them, but they were generally taken up without European acceptance of the culture in which they existed. The case of Indian doctors, too, is interesting, but there are no longer “medicine men” that travel from village to village taking care of people regardless of race. Unlike in many parts of Spanish America, there was not the same level of blending of peoples here. That’s not to say it didn’t exist—it did, a lot, but I think that Calloway’s view of cultural fusion takes the argument too far, to the point where it (unfortunately) looks more like fiction than truth.

Discussions of how Europeans transformed indigenous peoples can be found everywhere, so I won’t comment on this too much, but I will say that there was a bit more coercion involved than Calloway lets on here. While many European practices were accepted willingly by indigenous peoples, many more were forced upon them, so there was not an equal relationship between the two. Of course, there were regions where that was the case (see Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815), but that doesn’t make it true everywhere.

And yet, I admire the view of America that Calloway envisions. It allows us to ask questions about what might have been—what would a mixed Euro-North American culture really look like? To me, that’s a useful question, because it allows us to figure out why it did not turn out that way. I like this book a lot, but it needs to be supplemented with other works for a true picture of colonial North America.