On Indians and English

I have to say, I really appreciate Karen Kupperman’s writing. While she is the product of a much larger movement—namely, the “New Indian History,” her work has also showed a great deal of consistency over time. More than anything else, Kupperman seems to be interested in systems of thought held by both the English and North American Indians (this is also shown really well in The Jamestown Project).

Unlike in The Jamestown Project, where Kupperman analyzes the cultural, social, and intellectual milieu in which English settlers approached Native peoples, this book is dedicated primarily to myth-busting. A great deal of myths have emerged since the 17th century regarding Native peoples, the most nefarious probably being that Native Americans “disappeared” or will soon disappear due to demographic reasons (see, literally any Western film, or most literature that deals with American Indians—James Fenimore Cooper’s work stands out for solidifying that myth). Yet, these myths need unpacking, and Kupperman argues that they couldn’t be further from the truth if analyzed from the perspective of North America’s first English settlers. While some of these myths did emerge in the colonial period, they were generally the result of publications produced by those across the pond.

As Kupperman shows, most North American Indians were not fundamentally migratory (described here as being like “a herd of deer”), for instance—in fact, they had vibrant and dynamic settled societies often arranged around village, although the actual nature of these villages were distinct from the “average” English town. Another myth is that American Indians were only arguably human—something expressed in the exhibitions and collections established by Walter Raleigh—who spent a short time in South America but no time in North America, as far as I remember—and Richard Hakluyt—who organized the London Company but did not spend any time in the Americas. On the contrary, English settlers found a great deal in common with the Native peoples of the Americas, to the point where Kupperman argues that they may as well have been a “mirror” of their own societies.

The most interesting chapter to me was on the topic of religion, which was perhaps the greatest challenge that early English settlers faced in their contacts with American Indians. Unlike the wide variety of faiths indigenous to the Americas, the Christianity held by Europeans was a really rigid faith (although not nearly as rigid as clergy and the most devout would like us to believe—see The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller for an example). As a result, when English settlers proselytized, they required that Native Americans accept Christianity as a whole, coherent package or those who accepted the faith would not be recognized as being Christians at all. Yet, large numbers of indigenous peoples accepted elements of Christianity while the syncretized the faith with their earlier belief systems. To me, seeing alternative, less rigid Christianities is such a fascinating thing to examine. There is also a really interesting discussion of liminality here—through shared contact, American Indians became more “European” and Europeans became more “American,” while a handful went so far as to fully assimilate to the other group in the period at hand, both Englishmen into American Indians and American Indians into Englishmen. This is a topic discussed in Axtell’s The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America that I was happy to see reflected here as well.

While there were obviously tensions between indigenous peoples and Europeans in the first century of colonization (after, King Philip’s War took place in the period at hand), I feel like the subtitle to the book is almost a misnomer. While there is constant contact and interplay at here, there is very little “facing off.”

Anyways, this is a great book best read alongside other works of the “New Indian History” to get the full impact. Recommend.