New Worlds for All: Europeans,

¶ … New Worlds for All: Europeans, Indians, and the Remaking of Early America

When positing why America is unique as a nation, Americans often respond with references to American legal guarantees of freedom that date back to the founding of the Constitution, or, at the earliest, the 1776 Declaration of Independence. However, early American historian Colin Calloway contends that America's uniqueness as a nation extends far back in its history, long before the founding of the nation itself, to the plurality of nationalities and cultures that made up its early ethnic and cultural landscape during the first American settlements. Calloway challenges the idea that America was 'naturally' of the Native peoples and then impinged upon by European cultures. He also challenges the European historical worldview that Native culture was completely destroyed by immigration and European encroachment. Rather, he suggests that the varieties and pluralities of Indian culture were in dialogue with Europe in the so-called New World, and these cultural dialogues created a cultural landscape never seen before. Although the Europeans may have ultimately become the conquerors of the territory of what is now the United States of America, the cultural dialogue between native and conquering people is still in evidence. This has been true throughout history, from the Anglo-Saxon absorption through cultural "confluences" after the 1066 sacking of England, but is no were 'as true' as the European settlements' role in reconfiguring the culture of the Americas. (Calloway, 2)

Calloway relies primarily on primary source documents to make his case, although he begins his book by copiously citing other authors and historians, whose views he is largely attempting to argue against, while making his case about the uniqueness of Early American culture. His book proceeds in a vaguely chronological form, from the first encounters of the kind that gives the book its name, to the final, founding of the colonial nation and dominance over America's land. But the book is not strictly chronological, because Calloway is dealing with a variety of tribes and European nations, all of whom had slightly different interactions. Thus, Calloway may proceed chronologically, but thematically organized along the lines of chapters that discuss the impingement of new diseases upon the bodies of native peoples, missionary efforts of Europe vs. The natives, and the spread of Europe from the early waterside colonies into the frontier.

Calloway makes use mostly of letters, settlement accounts, and early government documents from Europe. He shows how he frontier was one of the most fertile sites of cross-pollination, including intermarriage between cultures. Because Europeans left more written sources, thus a clearer cultural picture of Europe emerges. However, a great deal of the anger of Europeans at home comes through, as Europeans were accused of forgetting civilized manners and being stripped of civilization in favor of animal skins and muskets, as they ate Indian food, adopted Indian ways, and lived in a way that perhaps seemed to be more amenable to the land. But human as well as environmental factors created this interaction, Calloway believes. (3)

Culture is never static, stresses Calloway. The transformation of Europe and Indian culture was mutual, despite the presence of missionaries and other apparently homogenizing forces. In fact, these homogenizing missionaries were often better integrated into European ways than one might expect. And even when they were not, and returned to Europe sniffing and huffing in letters and treatises about the evils of Native, pagan ways, they wielded some of their harshest critical words against Europeans who had 'gone native.' (4) These critiques are an example of how Calloway as a historian finds some portrait of how Native ways were before and after European settlers, how the settler's influence changed Native ways, and of the usefulness even of biased accounts of such early encounters between Natives and Europeans.

Calloway thus deals firstly with the assumed static and polarized war of historians that have given a misleading view of Indian and European interactions, before proceeding into the more rich and complex history provided by primary sources. However, he admits that his thesis is not without precedent, for as early as 1952, one historian noted that sports, agriculture, education, government, and all other facets of American life have seen the influence of Native influence. Without the Native Americans, observed James Axtell, another secondary historical commentator in Calloway's line of thought, America would not exist as we have come to think of it, despite early efforts of Europeans at cultural recreations. (4)

Natives did not always want to adopt European ways either. But the European cargo of "germs and guns" amongst other things, meant that they had no choice but to adapt to the shift in circumstances. If one tribe attempted to live as it always had, the addition of horses, guns, and other elements of warfare naturally upset the delicate power balance between tribes. The Europeans were also political actors of influence in the region as well. During King Philips' War the Iroquois in particular played the different European actors against one another. (146) Indians spoke Spanish and gave some of their words to the settlers, not by choice, but by simple contact. (173) Some tribes trapped and hunted native game like beavers to extinction in exchange for horses. (16) Others were decimated by illness -- and yes, some practiced active military resistance. Either way, all sides were changed in a way that resists easy categorization, Calloway points out, supporting his thesis with such specific examples of economic and linguistic impingements upon Native life that were not always resisted by the tribes.