Native Americans and the Early Republic, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, University Press of Virginia, 2000, 370 pp.; $49.50, hardcover; $17.50, paper

As the American Revolution wound down, J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur sounded a death knell for more than British colonial rule. Indians, he wrote, appeared to be "a race doomed to recede and disappear before the superior genius of the Europeans."[1] Ever since, most of us in the United States have been inclined to agree. On the face of it, Crevecoeur's prediction has seemed accurate, at least with respect to the course, if not the cause, of Indian history. Our history books and movies have told us that in the hundred years after the Revolution, Indian lands and populations got swallowed up, sometimes in small bits, other times in large chunks. As the nation grew, Natives became increasingly removed, literally and figuratively, from the centers of American culture. Once out of sight, it was easy to put them out of mind. And that's pretty much where they've remained, even for American historians. Today some of us, depending on where we live, get occasional glimpses of Native Americans and their part in America's past. But the disappearing act that Crevecouer forecast appears to have been realized.

Yet appearances can be deceiving. And in this case, as with Crevecoeur's more famous prophecy of a single American identity arising out of the interplay of multiple religious and ethnic groups, history has proven to be more complex and less certain than the Frenchman anticipated. At least that is the conclusion I have been coming to over the last decade.

It turns out that Crevecoeur was not a very good prophet (in any sense of that word), but he did help formulate a powerful fiction about the place, or lack thereof, of Native Americans in the emerging republic. White Americans in the late eighteenth century were inclined to associate Indians with a colonial past and not with a national future. They envisioned their fledgling nation as a "new world without Indians." Their nineteenth-century successors concurred. Presidents, pioneers, and professors relegated Natives more and more to the margins of American life, so much so that by the twentieth century it became difficult to imagine that Indians had ever been anywhere else.

That was certainly where I found them when I began graduate work at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1970s. My study of American history, including early America, caught sight of Indians only when I looked at the periphery. I proceeded to write a dissertation and a book about eighteenth-century religious diversity without giving Native Americans a second thought. What I did know about Indians at the time, I had learned mostly from a fellow graduate student, James Merrell. Jim was tirelessly working away on the Catawba Indians of the Carolinas. By the time his book on them appeared (1989),[2] he had convinced me that it was time to "dis-cover" Crevecoeur's fiction and to re-place Indians within American history. Many other historians arrived independently at the same conclusion, with the result that we are in the midst of an extraordinary outpouring of scholarship intended to do just that.

A case in point is Native Americans and the Early Republic. The contributors to this outstanding volume are collectively persuaded that accounts of the early national period must return Indians to the central places they occupied within American life down to the 1840s. Not surprisingly, Jim Merrell states this most boldly in an afterword that adeptly links the volume's ten preceding essays and sets out an ambitious research agenda for Native American historians. Over the past 15 years, Merrell's voice has been the sharpest and clearest among a new generation of Indian historians insisting that Natives be seen as major actors rather than bit players in the drama of colonial American history. Now he and his coauthors extend that argument to the first decades of the new republic.

Merrell suggests that however much Crevecoeur expected and others wanted Indians to go away (literally or culturally) in the 1780s, they hadn't and wouldn't for another two generations. Most of the continent north of the Rio Grande was still "Indian Country"; vast stretches of land remained under Native control, as they had been before the arrival of the first Europeans.

Even more telling, Indians retained a presence almost everywhere whites lived in post-Revolutionary America. Face-to-face contacts were far more commonplace in the late eighteenth century than we might imagine. Citizens of the new nation were accustomed to seeing and interacting with Natives. That would no longer be the case four or five decades later. By the 1830s, Indians had become little more than a novelty or a curiosity to most East Coast residents. What happened in the intervening years to bring about such a dramatic change is far less clear than it once seemed.

Simply acknowledging that this change occurred is more than many past students of the early Republic have managed. The essays in this volume, however, go a good deal further. For one thing, they show that there was no single path that all Natives traveled to arrive at their obscurity in white eyes. Nor was that destination so inevitable that Indian choices never mattered. Or to put it another way, Indians participated in their own history; they were important agents in shaping and responding to their circumstances, not the helpless victims of some preordained destiny.

Complexity and contingency consequently replace uniformity and predictability as major themes in these new accounts of Native Americans during the early Republic. As such, they sound a similar chord to what Ira Berlin has recently claimed regarding the history of slaves and slavery in North America during its first two centuries and to what Peter Charles Hoffer has argued for early American history in general. In the latter's words, "irony, contradiction, and contingency" were at the heart of the "unpredictable course" of events in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[3]

For Indians, few events were more contingent than America's War for Independence. As Colin Calloway rehearses the story in the book's prologue, Natives were determined to secure their own freedom during the American Revolution, but they were unsure which potential ally, if any, held the brightest promise of winning a victory advantageous to Indians. When forced to take sides, they split, not only between but within tribes. As a result, "the Revolution assumed the look of a civil war" for many Indian peoples. The losses they incurred only became compounded following the Treaty of Paris, for whether they had supported or opposed the colonial victors, Indians remained at war after 1783, now contesting with the influx of aggressive settlers who flooded westward in search of a better life. And if war and invasion were not enough, "economic dislocation, political factionalism and fragmentation, disruption of ancient traditions, hunger, disease, and betrayal into the hands of their enemies" soon beset Native American communities from New York to Georgia.

Yet not all was darkness, Calloway suggests, for "in the kaleidoscopic, 'all-change' world of the Revolutionary era, there were exceptions and variations. The upheaval generated by the Revolution offered opportunity as well as oppression." Seminoles, for example, seized the chance to break free of the Creek confederacy. Handsome Lake used it to generate spiritual revival among the Iroquois. Their examples and others point to an Indian resilience and resourcefulness usually overlooked. If Natives were susceptible to losing their worlds, they were also capable of reconstructing them.

Some of that rebuilding entailed rethinking who whites were and how to relate to them. For their part, many migrating whites were about the same business. The result, as a number of these essays make clear, was a complex range of cultural conceptions (or misconceptions) held by each of the other, conceptions that went a long way toward that shaping intercultural relations for the next two generations.

Among Euro-Americans, alongside Crevecoeur's fiction of the disappearing Indian arose the equally powerful myth of the resistant Indian: ally of the British in the Revolution (and therefore enemy of American liberty), obstacle to national expansion, and terror on the frontier. Like many potent myths, this one contained a measure of truth. After all, from the outset there were Indians who quite understandably resisted the incursions of Europeans with all the means at their disposal. But, also from the outset, there were others who formed alliances with the newcomers, while still others pulled back "out of range." As a comprehensive account of Indian identity, then, the notion of the resistant Indian was a self-serving fiction by which whites "justified massive dispossession of Native Americans."

Reginald Horsman's interpretation of post-Revolution relations places more emphasis on federal policymakers' embrace of Enlightenment ideals, including the notion of the meliorative savage, a Native capable of being saved by "civilization" if only he gave up his Indianness. Elise Marienstras finds both positive and negative images of Indians circulating within white popular culture in the early 1800s, each contributing in its own way to the formation of an American national identity that defined itself over against alien Indians.

That whites were not the only ones operating according to fictions about the other becomes clear in Richard White's analysis of Indian-U.S. diplomacy in the late eighteenth century. Natives had long been inventing their own stories about European newcomers, especially in the Old Northwest, where the fictions employed on both sides of the cultural divide had helped create a "middle ground" that allowed for mostly peaceful and productive relations in the colonial era. American independence brought new circumstances, but images of whites remained a critical part of the thinking of Indian leaders. Their disagreements in the 1780s and 1790s over whether to see Americans as benevolent (George Washington in the imagery of the day) or malevolent (proverbial Big Knives) contributed to the diversity of Native responses to U.S. policies in the early Republic.

That perceptions of reality were often more important than reality itself in shaping Indian-white exchanges in the Revolutionary era and beyond should not be surprising. After all, if that was the case, it only parallels what was true for other American relationships at the time. For example, some historians since the 1960s have argued that belief in a British plot against American liberty in the 1760s and 1770s, whether there was in fact one or not, was sufficient to push many colonists toward rebellion. But we may be surprised at just how wide the gap between perception and reality was among peoples with more dramatic cultural differences.

Theda Perdue, for example, looks at eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Euro-American traveler and trader accounts of Native women and finds a "remarkably uniform assessment" that got some descriptive detail right but usually misread female economic, familial, and sexual activities in ways that left whites feeling disturbed and threatened. From today's perspective, it is clear that these observers were too quick to presume that the same acts meant the same thing in all cultures and too slow to catch on to the possibility that Indian peoples might have their own definitions and rules regulating their social behavior.

Perhaps there was no more important an instance of misinterpretation than the Euro-American claim that agriculture was not a vital part of Native economies, and never would be until men replaced women as the principal agricultural laborers in Indian societies. Proponents of Jeffersonian agrarianism in the early nineteenth century consequently pushed for Native males to give up the hunt and take up the plow. Native women, in turn, were to give up the hoe and take up the household. Nothing less than major elements of the new nation's "civilizing" policy toward Native Americans in the early Republic were based upon such perceptions. As a result, the realities of Native women's lives were altered in fundamental ways.

Why was cultural misperception so prevalent in Indian-white relations? It's tempting to lay the blame both on ignorance and on a willful desire to misunderstand for the sake of legitimating one's own actions. No doubt those factors played a part. But Daniel H. Usner, Jr., finds a more complex part of the answer in the lens eighteenth-century Euro-Americans used to view Indian lifestyles. He, too, is specifically interested in why Jeffersonians couldn't "see" that eastern woodland Indians farmed. Whites' apparent blindness stemmed from embracing a theory of human behavior which asserted that "how a society utilized natural resources determined the rates of growth in population and of movement up a ladder of evolution." With such a model in mind, Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s attributed the impressive natural increase of the colonial population to Europeans' agrarian ways. Meanwhile, Native depopulation was interpreted as the natural fruit of their lives as hunters. A half-century later, Jeffersonians, operating under the same assumptions, eagerly tried to get Indians on board with their vision of national commercial agricultural expansion. Indian survival, they claimed, depended on a fundamental shift in the Natives' livelihood.

Yet the demand that Indians farm like whites came at the same moment that whites were also demanding more access to Indian lands. No wonder Indian peoples like the Iroquois felt squeezed, and no wonder they resisted some if not all of the Jeffersonians' reform agenda. Operating from "an understanding of livelihood sharply different from the Jeffersonian model of economic life," the Iroquois in western New York made their own decisions about what to keep and what to change in their economic activities. The result was a set of choices that in Usner's mind "contributed in the long run to [Iroquois] endurance through the nineteenth century and to the present."

Whether Usner is right about the Iroquois is probably less important than recognizing the value of his effort to see their actions from the inside. Only by putting on the mind of the Iroquois or other Native Americans can historians hope to read more accurately the motives and meanings of Indian acts. That may sound obvious, but until rather recently historians have been disinclined or unable to do so. While anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists have helped historians "get inside" Native communities, much of the best recent historical work is primarily the result of lending a keener ear to what Indians said and a keener eye to what Indians did.

Take, for example, Daniel K. Richter's analysis of Seneca relations with Pennsylvania's new government in the decade after the American Revolution. Richter shows that only by listening more carefully to what the Seneca in their diplomatic negotiations meant by terms like Father, Brother, and Onas (an Iroquoian word referring originally to William Penn and then to later colonial governors) can we understand how they understood their changing world in the 1780s. Joel W. Martin similarly tries to look from within the cultural matrix of Native groups in the southeast to see how they responded to the upheavals of the late eighteenth century. He finds that Cherokees and Muskogee Creeks, faced with the territorial and cultural onslaught of Euro-Americans, hid essential values and convictions from the newcomers. They created a "cultural underground" as a form of resistance; by developing and concealing ideas and practices that championed Indian separateness, Cherokees and Muskogees preserved spaces of autonomy from white intrusion.

Studies like Martin's are commendable for taking us deeper into Indian worlds in a way reminiscent of what Albert Raboteau accomplished two decades ago when he unveiled slave religion as the "invisible institution" of antebellum slavery.[4] But Jim Merrell thinks we need to go even further into Indian Country. To the extent that all these essays focus primarily or exclusively on Indian points of contact with or responses to whites, they don't touch the daily lives of most ordinary Natives. Merrell believes that existing sources, creatively employed, can yield narrow peeks if not wide vistas into those lives. Telling their stories would help enlarge our picture of what it meant to be an Indian in the early Republic.

They might also, at least indirectly, tell us more about our broader national experience if linked to what was happening with other Americans at the time. Interesting parallels exist, for example, between Indian and white spiritual renewal movements in the early nineteenth century. Beyond that, if we could see Indians and whites not only participating in similar events but as coparticipants in a collective past (although not an identical past), we might see the history of the early Republic whole to a degree hitherto unrealized.

How important is that? Perhaps a partial answer may be inferred from the words of Tarhe, a Wyandot leader, who after a defeat in 1795 encouraged federal officials to "take care of your little ones; an impartial father equally regards all his children." No historians, I suspect, would want to think of themselves as "fathers" to those Americans of whatever stripe who lived through the early national period. But we, historians and ordinary Americans alike, may be their siblings, and the call to impartiality should fall upon our ears as weightily as Tarhe hoped it would fall upon Federalist policymakers.

Treating all the participants in our nation's early history with what James Axtell has called "moral and methodological parity" seems imperative if also elusive.[5] Giving all their due has proven no easier in reconstructing the past than it did for those living it in the first place. To their credit, the contributors to Native Americans and the Early Republic generally do well at enlarging our understanding of Native history without resorting to unfair, one-sided judgments. Such justice-doing will not erase the stain of the trials and tragedies that too often beset relations between Indians and whites in the post-Revolutionary era. But it might help us to undo our longstanding national impulse to accept Crevecoeur at his word.

Richard W. Pointer is professor of history at Westmont College.

1. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, and, Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (Viking Penguin, 1981), p. 122.

2. James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989).

3. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); Peter Charles Hoffer, The Brave New World: A History of Early America (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 3.

4. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (Oxford Univ. Press, 1978).

5. James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. ix.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:

• Native Americans and the Early Republic, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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