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...
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.
Calloway's book is valuable not simply because of the wealth of information and specifics he uses to show the ways different cultures can combine to produce a new nation and culture. It also shows that from the beginning, there was no seamless and harmonious American identity, that America was a land founded in many cultures, in pluralities of attitude even amongst Native peoples. European culture was simply another addition to the rich cultural complexities of mixing religions, ethnicities, and identities. If Calloway's thesis occasionally leads him to down play the undoubted horrors of the illness and the massacres waged against some tribes, his view is also a refreshing relief to the idea that Indians were victims, rather than historical actors of cultural significance in their own right in the early forging of a new nation.
Works Cited
Calloway, Colin. New Worlds for All: Europeans, Indians, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore: Johns…
