Native Americans and the Atlantic World (Atlantic History)

Introduction

The Atlantic World is an historical concept that frames the histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the opening of the age of European exploration to the ending of the American wars for independence in the 1820s. It emerged as an idea in the midst of World War II as a way to conceptualize the military and cultural alliance that had bound Great Britain and the United States through both world wars. To be sure, earlier historians of empire, exploration, and conquest had examined many of the issues that would later characterize Atlantic World scholarship, but they wrote in the absence of an overarching framework and instead focused mainly on the flow of people, ideas, and goods from Europe to the Americas with little to no consideration of how such flows affected indigenous and African societies and how they reverberated back across the Atlantic. The exigencies of World War II, however, required new ways of thinking about the nations that clung to the eastern and western edges of the Atlantic—“the inland sea of Western Civilization,” as it was known in academic circles—against the collective might of Fascist Europe. After the war, colonial historians pulled the Atlantic World model away from government policy makers and international diplomats and applied it to a series of important studies of the Chesapeake Bay region, Puritan New England, and Spanish Mexico. The rise of the study of slavery in the 1960s and 1970s further augmented such earlier works and expanded the notion of what exactly a colonial society was. Later developments in African history afforded links between colonies and that continent such that the map of the Atlantic World expanded to include the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Congo, and the Bight of Benin. More recently, as scholars followed the paths blazed by colonial trade and chattel slavery, they uncovered the ways in which North America’s first peoples interacted with the Atlantic World, how their lives changed as a consequence of Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean, and how, in their turn, they shaped the contours of this new and expanding world. Dependence on trade goods, the ravages of epidemic diseases, indigenous efforts to counter both the growth of colonies and the devastation wrought by the trade in enslaved first peoples constitute major areas of investigation that have clearly shown the level of engagement first peoples had with Africans and Europeans through their membership in the Atlantic World.

General Overviews

Current scholarship on the Atlantic World tends to focus on the European and African components of the Atlantic World, and essay collections offer an accessible way to delve into the multiple research agendas and questions that characterize this rapidly growing field. Armitage and Braddick 2009 grew out of a series of papers delivered at the 2001 Harvard University International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, a seminar that emerged as an important incubator for scholarship in the field. Greene and Morgan 2009 present essays that focus more on synthesizing the field than on the specific topics that characterize Armitage and Braddick 2009. Bailyn 2005 steps back from the specific concerns of historical research to ponder instead both the origins and the future of the field in an elegant and accessible set of essays that ground the field in reference to changes in American politics, historical practice, and notions of multiculturality. Thornton 1998 establishes Africa as a constituent corner of the Atlantic World and challenges the European focus that had characterized much of the scholarship. Egerton, et al. 2007 and Shannon 2004 build on the European and African strands of scholarship while incorporating first peoples as well in their textbook approaches to the Atlantic World. Shannon 2004 is shorter and more thematic than Egerton, et al. 2007 because the latter strives for a more comprehensive and expansive consideration of both the scope and timeframe of the Atlantic World. Weaver 2014 draws such themes together in the first book-length treatment of Native Americans’ participation within and contributions to the broader Atlantic world from first encounters with the Norse to their impact on popular culture and imagery. In conjunction with Gilroy 1993 and Thornton 1998, such books have established that people from America, Africa, and Europe together created the Atlantic world.

Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. 2d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
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Essays from 2001 that demonstrate the potential of the Atlantic approach to the study of history and that were intended to inform similar studies of the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch empires, but that touch only tangentially on Native American topics.
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Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
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A thoughtful and elegant consideration of the idea of the Atlantic World that charts future prospects for the field of study while also recollecting the origins of the approach.
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Egerton, Douglas R., Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007.
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Comprehensive textbook that brings together the history of Europe, Africa, and native North America with a focus on the cultural mixtures that followed the founding of European colonies and the trade in slaves and commodities.
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Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. New York: Verso, 1993.
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First major contribution to Atlantic history that departed from the usual focus on Europe. Gilroy argued that a black consciousness transcended Africa and the Americas and linked people across the entire Atlantic world in a diaspora that shared certain common cultural features and a national sense of self.
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Greene, Jack P., and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Significant collection of essays that synthesize extant scholarship on the various European empires, Native Americans, and Africans, and that offer reconsiderations of the field from a variety of perspectives.
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Shannon, Timothy J. Atlantic Lives: A Comparative Approach to Early America. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004.
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One of the first textbooks on Atlantic World history that draws together disparate scholarship to tell a cogent story of the collision between European, African, and Native American peoples until the end of the American wars of independence in the 1820s.
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Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511800276Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
First book to summarize and develop the human history of Africa as it relates to the African slave trade and the influence of African cultures on the development of the various colonial societies in the Americas.
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Weaver, Jace. Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
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The first synthesis of Native American Atlantic world history. It explores such central themes as disease, enslavement, diplomacy and politics, and popular culture.
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Introductory Texts

Just as historians of the Atlantic World have been slow to incorporate Native North American history, so too have students of the native past been reluctant to shift their gaze from the various national or tribal histories that constitute this past to the continental and transcontinental ties that bound Europe and Africa to the Americas after the Columbian encounter. Typically, the writing of Native American history is premised on a divide between precontact and postcontact eras as a way of conceptualizing the impact Europeans had when they invaded the Americas which entails particular problems with documentary sources, interpretive methods, and historiographical values. López Austin and López Luján 2001 typifies the approach with a survey of preconquest Mexico. While the authors’ use of archaeological and anthropological evidence is insightful and accessible, ending their survey at contact creates the impression of dramatic break in Mexican life before and after Columbus when much current scholarship points instead to important continuities. Jennings 1976 set the field of Native American history on its head with its critical destruction of the belief in the triumph of “civilization” over “savagery” that had characterized the Puritans’ bellicose relationships with Native Americans and that implicitly informed American histories of the colonial period up to the 1960s. Trigger 1991 steps away from Jennings’s polemical tone to posit a way around the “romantics,” who saw culture as the determinative factor in the outcome of contact history, and the “rationalists,” who doubted the salience of culture and instead privileged an essentially human rationality that characterized both sides of the contact divide. Instead, Trigger 1991 argues that in the early days of post-Columbian contact, culture defined the contours of the contact experience, but as natives and newcomers came to know each other over time, their culture-bound perspectives gave way to a more pragmatic approach toward human interaction. Salisbury 1996 builds upon earlier assertions by archaeologists and anthropologists to argue that contact with Europeans was but one important episode in an ongoing continuum of Native American history, and that the antiquity of ancient North America needs to be incorporated in any study of colonial contact. Such ideas informed Richter 2001, which hypothesizes how Native Americans might have perceived the European invasion of their lands according to their cultural perspectives, while the essays collected in Ethridge and Shuck-Hall 2009 take a more rational approach to the destructive effects of trade, settlement, and military conflict on the native peoples who encountered the Europeans. Dickason and McNab 2009 and Edmunds, et al. 2007 offer overviews of the native history of present-day North America from the time before contact to the present, contextualize the colonial concerns of the other books, and explore the deep continuities that link the pre- and post-Columbian eras.

Dickason, Olive Patricia, and David McNab. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples to the Present. 4th ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Comprehensive exploration of Canadian history premised on the idea that native peoples were the nation’s founding peoples and that Canada’s subsequent history flows from this basic fact.
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Edmunds, R. David, Frederick E. Hoxie, and Neal Salisbury. The People: A History of Native America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
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An excellent textbook whose focus on the ethnohistorical method and the interpretation of culture sets it apart in the field.
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Ethridge, Robbie, and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds. Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
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A major collection of essays that comprehends the entirety of the eastern seaboard in the colonial era and that posits the shattering effects colonial contact had on Native Americans in ways that will shape future research in the field for years to come.
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Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976.
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A classic work in Native American history that offers one of the earliest and most insightful critiques of the assumptions about the inevitable triumph of “civilization” over “savagery” that had informed the writing of United States history for nearly two centuries.
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López Austin, Alfredo, and Leonardo López Luján. Mexico’s Indigenous Past. Translated by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.
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Archaeological and ethnohistorical survey of Mexican cultures before contact that focuses on cultural developments related to horticulture and political centralization from the deserts of the present-day southwestern United States to the lush highlands of Mayan Central America.
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Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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An important book that repositions the history of colonial contact on the eastern seaboard of what became the United States in reference to the native peoples who received the westering invaders and, in so doing, challenges the basic assumptions that have informed most of the writing of American and Native American colonial history.
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Salisbury, Neal. “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53 (1996): 435–458.
DOI: 10.2307/2947200Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Article that repositioned the field by arguing that the antiquity of Native American history had to be considered as fundamentally important to any history of native contact with European colonizers.
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Trigger, Bruce G. “Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations.” Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1195–1215.
DOI: 10.2307/2078259Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An article that identifies two basic ways of interpreting the Native American past and that proposes a way to synthesize the two approaches in order to arrive at a more nuanced and realistic appraisal of the history of colonial contact.
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Bibliographies

There are neither databases nor bibliographies that focus on native North America’s connections to the Atlantic World. Instead, a few excellent reference works survey the broad field of study but include chapters, essays, bibliographies, and other materials relevant to the study of native North America and the Atlantic World. Murdock and O’Leary 1975 organizes and lists scholarly publications up until the early 1970s to provide students with a start in investigating either specific nations or certain topics. The List of Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology is an online resource that will give students access to the numerous cultural and archaeological reports filed by scholars working under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. Sturtevant 1978–2008 is the standard reference work in the field and provides encyclopedic coverage over twenty volumes of almost every nation that inhabited the present-day United States as well as special topics such as contemporary Native American life. The encyclopedia Hoxie 1996 is far shorter but covers major areas of interest, while White 2004 gives the most current listing of resources, both printed and online, to be found in the field.

Hoxie, Frederick E., ed. Encyclopedia of North American Indians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
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Comprehensive guide to topics and biographies in native North America covering the precontact era to the present.
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List of Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
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Online version of Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 200, published in 1971, which indexes by author and title the vast number of cultural and archaeological reports undertaken and compiled by the Smithsonian Institution beginning in the late 19th century.
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Murdock, George Peter, and Timothy J. O’Leary. Ethnographic Bibliography of North America. 4th ed. 5 vols. New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, 1975.
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Guide to published scholarship on native North American focusing on culture groups but including other topics as well from the contact era to the 1970s.
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Sturtevant, William C., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. 20 vols. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978–2008.
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Twenty-volume encyclopedia explores languages, cultures, history, archaeology, anthropology and human biology in variety of chapters written by established scholars.
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White, Phillip M., comp. Bibliography of Native American Bibliographies. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.
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Lists more than eight hundred print and online bibliographies of native North American topics covering the United States and Canada from precontact times to the present.
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Research Methodologies

The study of native North America requires particular methodological considerations that are not common to other fields. Axtell 1979 offers one of the earliest methodological statements about the practice of ethnohistory and makes a clear case for the value of a method that juxtaposes the historical interests of history with a focus on the questions of culture that predominate in anthropology. Galloway 2006 builds on this earlier work and takes the discipline in new and interesting directions that have allowed it to change with the times. Mignolo 2003 and Chakrabarty 2008 do not address ethnohistory, but their critiques of Western historical convention suggest that the ethnohistorical method has a role to play in a broader postcolonial project. Nabokov 2002 draws together a variety of ways in which a Native American sensibility that rests on notions of cyclical time, the value of prophecy, and a different understanding of power articulates a challenge to Western historiographical conventions, while Fixico 2013 posits particular approaches to Native American history that seek to establish respect, wisdom, and relationships as the cardinal values of an indigenous historical practice. Such work makes a space in the field for native voices to assert entirely different understandings of the past and its meaning that Lamana applies to early conquest narratives to explicate how no single story can ever comprehend the multiple agents, perspectives, and implications that accompanied any cultural encounter.

Axtell, James. “Ethnohistory: An Historian’s Viewpoint.” Ethnohistory 26 (1979): 1–13.
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The article that defined the field because it lays out clearly how ethnohistory braids together the archival and interpretive nature of historical scholarship with the cultural investigations that are typical of anthropology, archaeology, and other allied disciplines.
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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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An important statement about the value of postcolonial efforts to disembed the practice of scholarship from the European assumptions, expectations, and conventions that characterize much of professional academia.
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Fixico, Donald L. Call for Change: The Medicine Way of American Indian History, Ethos, & Reality. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
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Argues that most American approaches to the Native American past are irredeemably colonial and proposes an indigenous theory of history based on respect of people and the multiple relationships that comprise our lives in the worlds we inhabit.
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Galloway, Patricia. Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
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Essays written by one of the most important practitioners of ethnohistory over the past twenty years that span topics from ethnohistorical practice to the dispensation and ownership of excavated/looted Native American objects and skeletons.
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Lamana, Gonzalo. Domination without Dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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Uses Pizarro’s invasion of the Incas to retell conquest history in relation to the multiple actors who witnessed it and multiple voices that recorded it.
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Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. 2d ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
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A novel exploration of the creation of Renaissance colonial literature, maps, histories, and culture that exposes the relationship between literacy, power, and Native Americans’ loss of land and sovereignty, the implications of which are based on Mignolo’s study of Latin America but are applicable to North America as well.
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Nabokov, Peter. A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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An accessible overview of how Native American societies remember and commemorate their pasts through such media as oral histories, folktales, mythology, rituals, and artifacts.
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Columbian Exchange

In the early 1970s Crosby 2003 inaugurated the concept of the “Columbian exchange” with a pathbreaking study of the commodities and microbes that passed back and forth between the Americas, Europe, and Africa in the aftermath of Columbus. The author’s argument about the importance of American foodstuffs and luxury goods to world trade reconfigures our understanding of the role Native Americans played in the global economy, and his notion of “virgin soil” epidemics explains why European diseases were so lethal to Native American societies. Dobyns 1983 and Thornton 1987 elaborate upon Crosby’s conclusions about disease and argue that pre-Columbian populations were much larger than was previously believed, which, in turn, meant that the impact of diseases was even more destructive for first peoples than previously thought. Henige 1998 casts doubt on such demographic reconstructions by poking holes in the statistical methods, sources, and assumptions that characterize such studies, while Alchon 2003 diminishes assertions that such epidemics were exceptional to the Americas. Instead, Alchon argues, diseases such as smallpox and influenza were just as lethal in Europe as they were in the Americas but that the combined effect of wave after wave of epidemics in the Americas was different from the European experience. Bauer 2001, Anderson 2004, Williams 2009, and Seeman 2010 build on Crosby’s pathbreaking work on the introduction of Eurasian and African plants and animals to the Americas and the substantial impact such transfers had on Native Americans. Bauer’s investigation of material goods in Latin America, for example, shows how production and power changed over the course of colonization, with deleterious effects on the native peoples who produced the goods, particularly as production came to be tied to exploiting market interactions as opposed to fulfilling subsistence needs. The arrival of cattle, sheep, and pigs transformed the landscapes of New England and the Chesapeake as well, and Anderson 2004 reveals how animals comprised a third wave of colonization. Their presence not only instigated tensions between English colonists and Algonquian peoples, but also demanded that native peoples find ways to accommodate their presence on the land mentally and materially. In a more recent collection of essays, Williams draws upon the work of historians as well as archaeologists to explicate how such transfers fit explicitly into the multiple flows of exchange that comprised the Atlantic World. Seeman 2010 moves away from the subject of material culture and instead examines how European, African, and Native American notions of (and practices related to) death changed in light of contact and provided moments when people of different cultures could have shared experiences.

Alchon, Suzanne Austin. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.
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Argues that the new diseases were no more lethal in the Americas than in Europe or Africa, but that the combination of new diseases in the Americas exacerbated each epidemic’s lethal impact.
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Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195158601.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The most comprehensive study of the impact European animals had on the colonization of North America. Such animals destroyed indigenous environments, stressed resident animal populations, and constituted an important part of the broader colonial invasion.
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Bauer, Arnold J. Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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An exploration of the core items in material life—food, clothing, and shelter—in pre-Columbian Latin America and how contact with the Spanish instigated a transition from social and cultural production and demand to a market-driven system of production based on consumption.
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Crosby, Alfred W., Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th ann. ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003.
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First published in 1972. One of the most important books in the field, which identified the variety of commodities that moved between the Americas, Africa, and Europe and which identified the decimation of Native American populations caused by European and African diseases as a crucial factor in shaping how colonization unfolded.
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Dobyns, Henry F. Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.
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In one of the earliest demographic works to grow out of Crosby 2003, first published in 1972, Dobyns calculates the maximum number of people that the landscape of pre-Columbian Florida could have sustained and extrapolates a population figure for native North America on the eve of Columbus’s arrival.
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Henige, David. Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
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Poses significant challenges to the work of demographers who study native North America by calling into question their statistical methods, their uses of fragmentary sources, and their impact on revisionist assessments of the death and destruction that followed the European invasion.
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Seeman, Erik R. Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010.
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A cross-cultural comparison of how, during the colonization of the Americas, first peoples, Africans, and Europeans came to discover and share certain assumptions about dying and death. Such common notions of death made cross-cultural communication possible at the same time that it opened up new ways for colonizers to exploit others in the name of conquest.
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Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.
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An important synthesis of demographic scholarship that traces Native American population loss from European and African diseases from the centuries that followed Columbus to the present and identifies the 19th century as the nadir of the Native American population.
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Williams, Caroline A., ed. Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.
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A collection of essays that draws together recent historical and archaeological scholarship on the movement of peoples and things between the Americas, Europe, and Africa in an effort to bridge the discrete boundaries between empires and nations and between academic disciplines.
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Trade

Trigger 1991 (cited under Introductory Texts) identifies the two basic schools of thought in the writing of the history of economic relationships between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. Rationalists attribute to Native American hunters and traders a suite of economic behaviors associated with neoclassical economics that privilege acquisition, profit, and entrepreneurialism. Romanticists, however, view economic relationships as secondary to cultural ones and argue that trade would be better understood as an exchange of gifts, alliances, and amities rather than as economic transactions conducted on the edges of the capitalist system. Arthur J. Ray was one of the earliest proponents of the rationalist view even though his work (Ray 1997) contained great cultural nuance and sensitivity. White 1983 sets aside the rational/romantic paradigm and instead deploys dependency theory to show how the deerskin trade drew Choctaws into the world capitalist system. Aside from the environmental devastation wrought by the trade, the incompatibility of the demands of capitalism with the values of Choctaw culture forced the nation to figure out how to manage its indebtedness while at the same time struggling to figure out how to adapt politically, socially, and economically to their existence in a system that was fundamentally at odds with their view of the world. Saunt 1999 carries such arguments past the initial contacts made through the fur trade and into the new economic order that settled across native North America in the late eighteenth and early 19th centuries. Saunt contends that as market forces supplanted cultural behaviors, class and racial divisions that grew out of the fur trade and the liaisons between Creek women and Anglo-Scottish traders divided Creek society in ways that bound them to the emerging order of the Atlantic World. Hall 2009, a study of trade between South Carolina, Georgia, and the Creeks, and Usner 1992, a study of the Louisiana colony, however, point to the resilience and importance of Native American cultures in limiting the reach of capitalism and in enabling the creation of new forms of cultural practice and understanding. Podruchny 2006 draws such connections together in the form of new kinds of people, the voyaguers who conducted the Great Lakes fur trade. Her exploration of their culture, their marriages, and their children foregrounds the métis people who grew out of early economic connections.

Hall, Joseph M., Jr. Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
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Situates trade between Creeks and Anglo-Americans in South Carolina and Georgia in reference to their cultural understandings about production and exchange, and argues that each side sought to adapt their cultural understandings to the other in an effort to accommodate peaceful exchange and coexistence in the face of constant tension and frequent warfare.
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Podruchny, Carolyn. Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
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The best study of the Frenchmen who expanded throughout North America to conduct the fur trade. Their marriages, families, and facility with indigenous cultures enabled them, in partnership with various first peoples, to create new societies and, over time, a new people: the métis.
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Ray, Arthur J. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
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A study of Cree economic behavior that finds male hunters developed a “rational” sense of economic exchange as they adopted the acquisitive values and profit-minded work ethic typical of entrepreneurial capitalism.
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Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511511554Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In the aftermath of the creation of early trade relationships, the Creeks witnessed an unequal distribution of property and wealth that created nascent class and racial divisions within their society.
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Trigger, Bruce G. “Early Native North American Responses to European Contact: Romantic versus Rationalistic Interpretations.” Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1195–1215.
DOI: 10.2307/2078259Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important article that identifies and tracks the basic divide in the literature on trade between scholars who argue that Native Americans shared capitalistic behaviors not unlike those held by Europeans and those who assert that the cultural differences between native North Americans and Europeans meant that neither side truly understood the other in terms of economic behavior and trade.
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Usner, Daniel H., Jr. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
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Path-breaking examination of the myriad relationships between Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans involving exchanges and sales of labor, foodstuffs, and other goods outside of the official economy of the French colony of Louisiana, suggesting that such informal economic and cultural relationships underwrote the creation of a new multicultural society.
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White, Richard. Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
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Uses Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems/dependency theory to explicate the histories of three nations who were entangled in the expansion of European and United States capitalism in reference to the environmental and social changes that followed the arrival of capitalism, with an emphasis on its deleterious effects.
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Slavery

Historians had always known of the trade in Native American slaves that characterized the early colonial period, but scholarly studies of it remained few and far between until Perdue 1979. Perdue’s inquiry into the Cherokees’ adoption of plantation agriculture and enslavement of African Americans reveals changes in Cherokees’ notions of captivity and explains how Cherokee participation in the trade in Native slaves conditioned them to accept the enslavement of Africans toward the end of the colonial period. Gallay 2002 moves away from the lives of individuals and instead surveys the history of the Native American slave trade in the colonial Southeast and shows how the trade underwrote South Carolina’s early economic fortunes, wrecked scores of Native societies, pitted nations like the Yamassees and Tuscaroras against the colonial traders, and triggered the formation of new nations out of the fragments of those groups devastated by the trade in slaves. Subsequent scholarship has begun to fill in missing details. Bowne 2005 brings together the few sources that describe the mysterious Westos to write a history of a group that is remembered as one of the first nations in the Southeast to obtain guns and as the first nation to visit the horrors of the trade in Native Americans upon its neighbors. When their power threatened to imperil the fortunes of South Carolina, the colony armed other groups, who happily destroyed the Westos in the 1680s in order to assume the mantle of slave raiders for themselves. Rushforth 2012 fills in the picture for the nations that suffered the imposition of the French colonies of Quebec and Illinois. Native middlemen provided thousands of so-called “panis” to French traders, who then either exported the slaves or put them up for sale to the towns and seigneuries of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi river valleys. Rushforth’s focus on indigenous conceptions of enslavement opens new possibilities for the study of indigenous enslavement. Kelton 2007 links enslavement with the spread of smallpox to illustrate just how the slavery-related connections to the Atlantic world, as well as the violence and disruption that accompanied the trade, exacerbated the impact of diseases. Brooks 2002 opens the trade in slaves and captives in the edges of the northwestern border of Mexico to historical investigation, and the author’s painstaking depiction of life in these lands shows the innumerable bonds of kinship, friendship, and violence that bound Spanish Americans and Puebloes, Cheyennes, Apaches, and other groups into a cohesive, if fraught, multicultural society that all but vanished upon the annexation of the region by the United States in the 19th century.

Bowne, Eric E. The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
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The definitive work on the mysterious Westos, who served the colony of South Carolina as slavers and whose violent power wreaked havoc across the Southeast until rival nations collaborated to crush them.
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Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
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A sophisticated and richly documented study of the relationships that bound Native Americans and Spanish Americans, through the institutions and practices of slavery and captivity on the northwestern edge of Spanish Mexico, into a violent yet coherent colonial society.
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Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
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A monumental work that documents like no previous work the scope, contours, and impact of the colonial trade in Native American slaves in the Southeast and that pinpoints the carnage wreaked on the region’s native inhabitants by the constant wars fought to plunder nations of their men, women, and children for trade to European slavers.
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Kelton, Paul. Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
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Juxtaposes the relationship between the spread of smallpox with the expansion of the slave trade. Taken together, diseases and slaving decimated the indigenous population.
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Perdue, Theda. Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979.
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One of the first serious scholarly examinations of Native American slavery, which tracked the change in Cherokee concepts of captivity to include notions of enslavement appropriated from their colonial neighbors.
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Rushforth, Brett. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.5149/9780807838174_rushforthSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A pathbreaking book that explores the vast trade in humans that rivaled beaver pelts as the economic lifeblood of the colony of New France. The author engages enslaved peoples’ lives at the individual level to provide the richest account of indigenous enslavement we have.
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The Caribbean

Arawaks, Tainos, and Caribs were among the first peoples to meet Columbus and the Europeans that followed him. Cook and Borah 1971–1979 transformed the study of first contact and its impact on first peoples with a reconstruction of the Arawak population of Hispaniola on the eve of Columbus’s arrival in 1492. Spanish colonists as well as scholars had estimated the island’s precontact population at anywhere between sixty thousand and three or four million. In an effort to arrive at an accurate figure that would then aid the study of the devastation wrought by the Spanish invasion, Cook and Borah deduced a figure of 2,260,000, which, when compared to the almost total annihilation of the islands native population, bespeaks a colonial legacy of unimaginable horror and death. Keegan 2007 draws upon the archaeological record to posit that Taíno myths framed their understanding of and encounter with Spanish invaders. How the legacy of invasion, exploitation, and death was remembered by Europeans is the subject of Hulme 1986. In a study of English literary works as well as Caribbean folk tales Hulme chronicles how artistic representations mythologized the blood and brutality of the colonial enterprise. Particularly noted for its analysis of Columbus’s logbook, Shakesepare’s The Tempest, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Hulme’s book tracks the imprint that native suffering made on the European mind while also demonstrating the relevance of colonialism to European intellectual life. Returning the focus to the region’s first peoples, Oliver 2009 examines Taino and Arawak beliefs about and uses of religious objects called cemís to reconstruct the networks of power and alliance that underwrote revolts against Spanish conquistadors in Hispaniola in 1503–1504 and in Puerto Rico from 1511 to 1519. Boucher 1992 picks up the story in the Lesser Antilles, where Caribs tried to resist British and French invaders. While diseases took their toll, colonial efforts to remove the Caribs from larger islands like Martinique to smaller reserve islands remade the islands’ populations and inaugurated a legacy of wholesale removal of Native American populations throughout the Americas.

Boucher, Philip P. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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Examines the Carib encounter with the British and the French in the Lesser Antilles.
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Cook, Sherburne T., and Woodrow Borah. Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971–1979.
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Demographic reconstructions of the native populations of Hispaniola and Mexico that constitutes one of the earliest attempts to revise low scholarly estimates of Native American populations and that laid the foundation for later scholars to revise conclusions about the impact of the European invasion.
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Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. New London: Methuen, 1986.
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In a book that is as much a work of literary criticism as historical scholarship, Hulme uses texts such as The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe to explore how Europeans understood and explained their involvement in the colonization of the Americas.
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Keegan, William. Taíno Myth and Practice: The Arrival of the Stranger King. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
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Based on archaeological and ethnohistorical interpretations of the early contact record and shows just how preexisting beliefs and systems of knowledge construed the arrival of the Spanish conquerors.
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Oliver, José R. Caciques and Cemí Idols: The Web Spun by Taíno Rulers between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.
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Uses archaeological studies of religious artifacts to uncover webs of power that linked the polities of the Greater Antilles and that inspired resistance to Spanish conquistadors.
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Mexico

After conquering the Indies, the Spanish moved to the mainland of Mexico, where native populations like the Nahua (Aztec) recorded in writing, after the conquest, their experiences with the Spanish. León Portilla 2006 compiles excerpts from a variety of documents written by native people that describe their experiences and observations about the Spanish invasion. Scholars have questioned the mystical powers that some of the sources attribute to Cortés and his army. Hassig 2006, for example, argues that mundane matters of logistics and military tactics, far more than the alleged godlike powers claimed by the Spaniards, shaped the course of conquest. Clendinnen 2003, a classic study of the conquest of the Yucatan, likewise dispenses with any mystical treatment of the Spanish and instead focuses on the incommensurability of Spanish and Maya views of the world. Notwithstanding the bloody witch hunts that enabled the Spanish to assert their control over the Mayas, the Mayas wove Christianity into their indigenous view of the world both to appropriate the powers that, to their minds, had made the Spanish so formidable and also to minimize the place the Spanish held in the Mayan universe. Townsend 2006 retells the life of the slave girl Malintzin who was offered to the Spanish in tribute and who provided the Spanish with expert knowledge on the politics of middle Mexico and translated on their behalf negotiations with prominent native leaders, while Arnold 1999 describes the sacred landscapes inhabited by the Nahuas and how the Spanish conquest challenged and ultimately undid the sacred powers with which they had invested the land they inhabited. The aftermath of conquest could follow different tracks. Whereas Connell 2011 exposed how Spanish authorities sought to allow a limited amount of self-government to the indigenous inhabitants of Mexico City (which the inhabitants exploited as best they could), in Yucatan, according to Quezada 2014, the Spanish imposed several layers of colonial government on indigenous Mayan structures that suppressed and undermined traditional indigenous leadership.

Arnold, Philip P. Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1999.
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Explores the mythical and religious meanings with which Nahuas invested the land and how the Spanish invasion challenged the truth and power of the ceremonial landscape.
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Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511800528Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A classic study of the Spanish conquest of the Yucatan peninsula that juxtaposes a Spanish mind-set devoted to conquest with a Maya sense of the world that sustained their resistance to the Spanish but that also diminished the catastrophe of the Spanish invasion.
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Connell, William F. After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011.
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While Tenochtitlan was reconstructed as Mexico City, the Spanish relied upon Aztec municipal political structures to organize the new city’s government. Such continuities enabled Aztecs to retain some of their traditional authority but only within a broader system of colonial exploitation and conflict.
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Hassig, Ross. Mexico and the Spanish Conquest. 2d ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.
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An important reconsideration of the conquest of Mexico that made possible subsequent revisions to postcontact Mexican history.
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León Portilla, Miguel, ed. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Translated by Lysander Kemp. Boston: Beacon, 2006.
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An important collection of translated primary-source excerpts that opened to the general reader the Nahua perspective of the Spanish conquest.
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Quezada, Sergio. Maya Lords and Lordship: The Formation of Colonial Society in Yucatan, 1350–1600. Translated by Terry Rugeley. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.
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The personalized leadership that characterized precontact Mayan society declined in the face of the imposition of Spanish regional and municipal forms of government and sparked widespread political and social conflict as Mayans sought to reclaim the power they had lost.
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Restall, Matthew. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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Focuses on enslaved Africans and their free and enslaved ancestors in Yucatan but sheds light as well on how Mayas came to cope with the arrival of these people.
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Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
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Important scholarly effort to provide a comprehensive view of the woman who served as Hernán Cortés’s guide, mistress, and translator during the Spanish conquest of the Valley of Mexico.
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Northeastern North America

The landscapes of northeastern North America—present-day Atlantic Canada, Quebec, New England, New York, and Pennsylvania—witnessed various Algonquian and Iroquoian groups undergoing and learning to cope with the French, Dutch, and English invasions of their land. Salisbury 1982 repositions the history of the first peoples of New England in reference to the devastation wreaked by European diseases, which left populations so weak that they could not resist the first incursions made by English Puritans. The invasion wrought changes in the land that Cronon 2003 explores in a study of how pigs, chickens, cows, fences, and a host of European plants overtook the Algonquian landscape. Axtell 1985 rounds out the picture of what happened in New England by describing how Puritans used their economic and military power to impose their Christian faith on the weakened native communities that endured in and around their colonial settlements. The Abenaki reception of the Jesuits, Morrison 1984 argues, lead them to accommodate a new faith that, to their minds, clearly carried with it significant sacred power. At the same time, Morrison points out that Abenakis did not forsake their lifeways wholesale but rather selectively adopted those parts of the Jesuit creed that suited their own views of the world and how it worked. Richter 1992, an excellent ethnohistory of the Iroquois, pursues similar questions in an effort to interpret Iroquois cultural change and persistence and to ascertain how they relied upon traditional political structures such as the Great League of Peace and Power to balance the competing factional interests among their people. Merritt 2003 explores the life of the native inhabitants of Pennsylvania and shows that, in spite of the various ways that they knitted together their lives with those of the settlers who impinged upon their lands and with the Atlantic World that encompassed them all, the outbreak of the Seven Years War and the fear of Native Americans it unleashed destroyed the multicultural milieu and pitted so-called whites against so-called Indians. Similarly Silverman 2005 reveals the degree to which the Wampanoags of Martha’s Vineyard adopted a Christian faith that shared much with the religion of their colonial occupiers. No matter such important commonalities, however, desire for land and racial antipathies put constant pressure on the island’s original inhabitants. Memories of such histories tend to privilege the arrival of Europeans over Native Americans’ original occupation of the land. Such a theme, as O’Brien 2010 shows, runs throughout the historical literature on the northeast and has, in fundamental ways, distorted the 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century histories that continue to influence the field’s development.

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
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A foundational book in the field that compares and contrasts French efforts to missionize the Hurons and Iroquois of New France with English Puritan efforts to confine the native peoples of New England to the so-called Prayer Towns.
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Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
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Superb study of the dislocations of flora and fauna that followed the English Puritan invasion of the indigenous Algonquian landscape of what became New England, which showed that the story of colonial invasion and native resistance can be read as historical geography.
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Merritt, Jane T. At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
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Ties of trade, work, religion, and kinship linked the settler and Native American communities of Pennsylvania, but the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War divided communities and sparked the rise of a racial consciousness on the part of the colonists that reconfigured Native Americans who had been neighbors into savage “Others.”
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Morrison, Kenneth M. The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki-Euramerican Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
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An excellent case study of the cultural changes and accommodations that followed the Abenaki reception of Jesuit missionaries. As Abenakis incorporated the Christian faith into their feasting and ritual practices, they simultaneously challenged the Jesuits to adapt their own preconceptions about their divine mission.
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O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
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Exposes the degree to which early New England histories relied on rhetorical techniques to make it appear that the English were there first and that Native Americans’ occupation of the land was incidental and unimportant.
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Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
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An excellent ethnohistorical case study of the cultural change and persistence that characterized Iroquois life over three centuries as they coped with the arrival of French missionaries and English and Dutch traders and the consequent civil strife that grew out of such contacts.
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Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
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Expands upon Jennings 1976 (cited under Introductory Texts) to recast the Native history of New England in reference to the terrible impact European diseases had on the original inhabitants, which allowed the invaders to occupy what Salisbury describes as a “widowed land.”
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Silverman, David J. Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511806537Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Despite a number of cultural convergences, the Wampanoags discovered that their New England neighbors would never fully accept them, such that the people’s history became an endless struggle to defend themselves and their land.
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Southeastern North America

Merrell 1989, a classic study, argues that contact created a “New World” for native North Americans every bit as much as it did for Europeans and reframed historical thinking about postcontact North America. The book is a masterpiece of ethnohistorical scholarship, and it laid the groundwork for a number of revisionist works. Silver 1990 followed with an environmental study of the South that explores the European invaders’ impact on the land. Hatfield 2004 expands the picture to include the enslaved Africans who arrived shortly after Virginia’s founding in order to give a fuller picture of colonial Virginia as one part of a broader Atlantic World. Holton 1999 likewise posits that the origins of the American Revolution in Virginia reflected colonists’ tensions with Native Americans over land and their fears of enslaved Africans more than their various complaints against the British Empire. Cumfer 2007 further explicates the important multicultural mixing that occurred in the creation of Tennessee: it was such a mix of cultures that it became almost impossible to consider separate Africa, European, and Native American peoples. Such conclusions resonate with the multicultural themes that have come to characterize the impact Atlantic World historiography has had on the study of colonial America. Farther south, Worth 1998 charts the Timucuan reception of the Spaniards who invaded present-day Florida in the 16th century and how they forced the Spanish to adopt indigenous modes of governance and political economy in order to maintain their outpost at St. Augustine. Piker 2004 illuminates relations between the British and the Creeks in the 17th and 18th centuries through his study of the town of Okfuskee, where Creeks sought to defend their notions of sacred power and civic identity in the face of the expansion of the Atlantic World into their homes. Carson 2007 uses indigenous notions of history and historiography to retell the region’s precontact and colonial history by following each of the its founding peoples—Native American, African, and European—as their conflicts and compromises brought into being the kinds of multicultural assumptions and practices that were the social hallmark of the Atlantic World.

Carson, James Taylor. Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
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Multicultural interpretation of the South’s colonial origins premised on the histories of the three founding peoples—Native American, African, and European.
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Cumfer, Cynthia. Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
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Examines the multicultural mind-sets that made Tennessee a contested ground and demonstrates the impact each group had on the self-perceptions of the others. Uses the idea of cultural logic to extrapolate beliefs about gender, race, and spirituality.
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Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in Seventeenth Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
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Positions the multicultural society of colonial Virginia in the midst of economic and social ties to colonies in New England and the Caribbean.
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Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
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Novel argument about the root causes of Virginia’s entry into the American Revolution as reflecting tensions inherent in a society comprised of free Anglos, enslaved Africans, and marginalized Native Americans.
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Merrell, James H. The Indians’ New World: The Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
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One of the most important books in native North American historiography, which transformed the meaning of “New World” and set the standard for ethnohistorical interpretation of native cultural histories.
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Piker, Joshua. Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
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Considers Okfuskee as a colonial American town and uses it to explore the cultural, economic, and political tensions that characterized town life in other parts of the English colonies.
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Silver, Timothy. New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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Environmental history of the colonization of the Southeast that focuses more on the European than the Native American side of the story.
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Worth, John E. The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida. 2 vols. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
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Uses archaeological and historical evidence to invert the conventional understanding of the Spanish invasion of Florida by showing the extent to which the Spanish adopted Timucuan models of governance and political economy.
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North American Interior

The most significant interactions Native Americans in the continent’s interior had with the Atlantic World came through contact with the diseases, trade goods, and missionaries that flowed from Europe. Such contact allowed Native Americans in the interior to adapt more slowly to colonization and to significantly reshape their lives as they found their place in the unfolding of the Atlantic World. Holder 1970 reveals how Caddoan peoples of the Red River Valley became more stratified as they came to depend more and more on horticulture for their livelihood while the Dakota Sioux underwent an almost complete cultural transformation when horses arrived on the Great Plains and made possible the great bison hunts that became the core feature of Plains life. Pertulla 1992 builds on Holder’s findings to provide a thorough account of Caddo life before and after contact with Europeans, though some scholars have asserted that he overstates the impact of disease. Anderson 1997 follows Holder’s work on the Sioux and explores how their marriage practices allowed for the incorporation of fur traders into their families and clans and, by extension, into networks of political power. English and American traders, however, tended to refuse such ties of marriage, which forced them to seek more coercive ways to influence Sioux life. Along with trade came priests, and Devens 1992 explains how native women in the Great Lakes region rejected French Jesuits and English and American protestants who sought to impose religious and cultural practices that undermined local gender roles and cultures. Witgen 2012 takes a broader approach to the Great Lakes and Northern Plains regions to show how contact and trade, more than colonization, triggered important cultural changes in native societies that led to the creation of what Witgen calls a “New World.” Richard White’s book The Middle Ground (White 1991) is one of the most important books in the entire field of Native Americans and the Atlantic World, and it draws together studies of trade and missionaries to uncover the richness of the intercultural milieu that arose in the lands surrounding the Great Lakes while at the same time highlighting the fragility of such multicultural worlds in the face of imperial aggression. In response to White, DuVal 2006 argues that in the case of the Quapaws, Osages, and other nations that inhabited the Red and Arkansas river valleys, there was no middle ground. Instead, Native Americans wielded more power than the European newcomers, and so Europeans had to find ways to insert themselves into indigenous political and diplomatic structures that were acceptable to the holders of the “native ground.” In contrast, Warren 2014 details how the Shawnees fled the Ohio River Valley and divided themselves into several groups in order to survive various colonial contacts before regrouping in their homeland a century later to withstand American expansion. Much as happened in the “middle ground,” however, the “native ground” collapsed in the aftermath of the War of 1812 when the United States emerged as the preeminent non-Native power in the interior.

Anderson, Gary Clayton. Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650–1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1997.
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A pioneering study of how kinship shaped the colonial encounter. While French traders were willing to marry into prominent Sioux families, who sought access to trade goods and power, the Sioux had less success recruiting British and American traders into their clan-based alliances.
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Devens, Carol. Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
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An important and early critique of missionary work among the nations around the Great Lakes. Devens is most interested in how women refused and resisted the blandishments of both Jesuit Catholics and Anglo Protestants over three centuries of contact and colonization.
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DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
DOI: 10.9783/9780812201826Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues for the idea of “native ground,” as opposed to the “middle ground,” in the Red and Arkansas river valleys, which required Europeans to gain entry to this world in ways that enabled Native Americans to retain much of their power and agency until the War of 1812 brought it all to an end.
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Holder, Preston. The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains: A Study of Cultural Development among North American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970.
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A classic, though somewhat outdated, study of culture change in the face of European contact that focuses on the political centralization and stratification that occurred among the region’s horticultural peoples and the dramatic impact that the introduction of the horse had on Siouan peoples.
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Pertulla, Timothy K. The Caddo Nation: Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
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Draws archaeological and historical investigations together to explore the impact that disease, population loss, and French and Spanish trade in cloth, guns, and horses had on Caddo life.
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Warren, Stephen. The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
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Tracks the migration of Shawnee groups from the Ohio Valley to Illinois and Georgia, their reunion in the Chesapeake region, and their return to their valley homeland at the end of the American Revolution.
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White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511584671Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the most important books in the field, which overthrew the notion of the frontier and posited instead a “middle ground” on which Europeans and Native Americans, who did not understand one another, sought to create rituals and practices that allowed each to accommodate the other’s presence in a colonial culture of collaboration and mistrust.
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Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native World Shaped Early North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.9783/9780812205176Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Emphasizes adaptive change in the lives of Great Lakes and Northern Plains peoples as they came together during the 18th century to begin to think of themselves as one people arrayed in opposition to the colonies that had dominated the Atlantic seaboard.
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