- Email: [email protected]
The invasion of America: Indians, colonialism, and the cant of conquest
REVIEWS
91
FRANCISJENNINGS, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Pp. xvii + 369. $14.95) ARTHUR J. RAY,Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Hunters, Trappers and Middfemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay 1660-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Pp. 249. $12.50 and $450 softback) Retrieval of the past is achieved principally by two methods, additions to our existing corpus of knowledge and revisions of our interpretations of that knowledge. Arthur J. Ray has contributed to our knowledge by producing the first major study of the Indian in the western Canadian fur trade, using Hudson’s Bay Company records almost untouched by historians. Francis Jennings, on the other hand, has winnowed previously sifted materials to challenge virtually every basic tenet of the historiography of culture contact along the colonial Atlantic Seaboard. Both works employ broad interdisciplinary approaches to contact problems and demonstrate the complex interdependence that existed between native and invading societies for over 250 years. Jennings’ book is arranged in two parts. First he creates an elaborate conceptual framework for dealing with native-European interactions, a framework based on the thesis that contact occurred not between “savagery” and “civilization” but between two different civilizations. This thesis is not new, but no scholar has pursued it so diligently and so stridently as Jennings. Indeed the polemic tone of the work may obscure for some readers the fascinating model of acculturation which he produces in order to accommodate the conquest ideology of colonial invaders and the varied responses of native groups. There is no question, Jennings argues, that the initial goal of English colonists was absolute control of native land and people. It was explicitly racist and exploitive, and he cites the example of colonial Ireland as a parallel of what took place in North America. The results were predictable: the creation of dependent Indian societies, reduced drastically in numbers, displaced territorially, stripped both of sovereignty and property and subject to a barrage of alien economic and spiritual values. In part two, rhe author applies this framework to seventeenth-century New England. He conducts a blistering attack on the Puritans, depicting them as unmitigated conquerors and accusing them of falsifying official documents. This brings him into serious conflict with previous interpretations of Indian-Puritan relations. The evaluations of Douglas Leach, Alden T. Vaughan and Jennings are so contrasting as to constitute by themselves an interesting historiographic study. Jennings identifies the commercialization of hunting as a major consequence of acculturation. This is the focus of Ray’s book and, within the limits set, he succeeds admirably. His emphasis is on the locational, ecological and economic consequences of Indian involvement in the fur trade of the southern Prairie Provinces. The Assiniboine and Cree are the principal focus of attention. During the two centuries after 1660 these two groups were most seriously affected by the fur trade, but in distinctive ways. Whereas the more widely distributed Cree increased their numbers more slowly during the eighteenth century than their southern neighbours did, they gradually pushed the Assiniboine out of the parkland belt and, after faring better in the smallpox epidemics of the 183Os, were the most populous group in the region by 1870. The flexibility of the Cree in exploiting forest and parkland habitats, and of the Assiniboine in moving between parkland and grassland environments, allowed them to respond relatively well ro the changing locational and economic aspects of the fur trade. Ray demonstrates that firearms were less widely distributed among the Indians than has been generally assumed; they were most frequently used by groups in the forest zone. Indians further to the South continued to rely on the bow and arrow for bison hunting. The depletion of game and furs in the forests through the use of firearms was a major factor in the southward shift of the Cree and this brought them into increasing competition with the Assiniboine to the South and the Ojibwa to the East. This situation was intensified after the 1770s by competition for furs between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company.
91
FRANCISJENNINGS, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Pp. xvii + 369. $14.95) ARTHUR J. RAY,Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Hunters, Trappers and Middfemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay 1660-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Pp. 249. $12.50 and $450 softback) Retrieval of the past is achieved principally by two methods, additions to our existing corpus of knowledge and revisions of our interpretations of that knowledge. Arthur J. Ray has contributed to our knowledge by producing the first major study of the Indian in the western Canadian fur trade, using Hudson’s Bay Company records almost untouched by historians. Francis Jennings, on the other hand, has winnowed previously sifted materials to challenge virtually every basic tenet of the historiography of culture contact along the colonial Atlantic Seaboard. Both works employ broad interdisciplinary approaches to contact problems and demonstrate the complex interdependence that existed between native and invading societies for over 250 years. Jennings’ book is arranged in two parts. First he creates an elaborate conceptual framework for dealing with native-European interactions, a framework based on the thesis that contact occurred not between “savagery” and “civilization” but between two different civilizations. This thesis is not new, but no scholar has pursued it so diligently and so stridently as Jennings. Indeed the polemic tone of the work may obscure for some readers the fascinating model of acculturation which he produces in order to accommodate the conquest ideology of colonial invaders and the varied responses of native groups. There is no question, Jennings argues, that the initial goal of English colonists was absolute control of native land and people. It was explicitly racist and exploitive, and he cites the example of colonial Ireland as a parallel of what took place in North America. The results were predictable: the creation of dependent Indian societies, reduced drastically in numbers, displaced territorially, stripped both of sovereignty and property and subject to a barrage of alien economic and spiritual values. In part two, rhe author applies this framework to seventeenth-century New England. He conducts a blistering attack on the Puritans, depicting them as unmitigated conquerors and accusing them of falsifying official documents. This brings him into serious conflict with previous interpretations of Indian-Puritan relations. The evaluations of Douglas Leach, Alden T. Vaughan and Jennings are so contrasting as to constitute by themselves an interesting historiographic study. Jennings identifies the commercialization of hunting as a major consequence of acculturation. This is the focus of Ray’s book and, within the limits set, he succeeds admirably. His emphasis is on the locational, ecological and economic consequences of Indian involvement in the fur trade of the southern Prairie Provinces. The Assiniboine and Cree are the principal focus of attention. During the two centuries after 1660 these two groups were most seriously affected by the fur trade, but in distinctive ways. Whereas the more widely distributed Cree increased their numbers more slowly during the eighteenth century than their southern neighbours did, they gradually pushed the Assiniboine out of the parkland belt and, after faring better in the smallpox epidemics of the 183Os, were the most populous group in the region by 1870. The flexibility of the Cree in exploiting forest and parkland habitats, and of the Assiniboine in moving between parkland and grassland environments, allowed them to respond relatively well ro the changing locational and economic aspects of the fur trade. Ray demonstrates that firearms were less widely distributed among the Indians than has been generally assumed; they were most frequently used by groups in the forest zone. Indians further to the South continued to rely on the bow and arrow for bison hunting. The depletion of game and furs in the forests through the use of firearms was a major factor in the southward shift of the Cree and this brought them into increasing competition with the Assiniboine to the South and the Ojibwa to the East. This situation was intensified after the 1770s by competition for furs between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company.