Jennings was one of the first historians to assimilate the new understanding of what had happened to the thriving Indian civilizations of America when Europe crashed into them; the book fairly sizzles with his outrage, and it's an unforgettable read. ( )

Preface

Writing the preface in the midst of Watergate, Jennings begins the book by citing the example of Francis Parkman's "willfully and consistently misleading" history of colonial America. Instead of a glorious colonial past, Jennings wants us to consider the native people's perspective. For them, the colonial period was a period of invasion. From Parkman's view much of our history has been distorted by the cant of conquest, which - initially relying on propaganda - has metastasized into a full-blown ideology not unrelated to the Hubris that made Watergate possible.

Chapter 2: Widowed Land

"Incapable of conquering true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population." (p. 15)

And it is to this population of displaced natives that Jennings turns in this chapter. The ideology of conquest posits that savage peoples, such as the natives of North America, could not have supported a large population. The estimation of pre-Columbian population size for much of the 20th century, based upon the posthumously published work of James M. Mooney, put the native population of North America at 1 million. The very ideology that the invasion engendered was carried forward by historians throughout much of the century in their writing.

Pointing instead to the work done on the conquest of Mexico by Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, Jennings brings the decimation of native populations by disease to the forefront. As he points out, smallpox was smallpox and it was this disease in particular that ravaged both the Mexican and North American native populations and reduced them by perhaps 90%. Seeing their own immunity as a sign from God of their moral superiority, they were blissfully ignorant of the fact that the previous catastrophes of Old World Europe had provided this immunity to them.

Jennings points out that disease transmission does not require permanent settlement. Indeed, explorers like Coronado, de Soto, de Leon on the Gulf Coast and the Cabots in present day Canada are striking examples of ways in which contact could have initiated the spread of disease. He points out that the problem is bigger than this:

Besides these men with known names, the anonymous crews of thousands of fishing boats frequented the Grand Banks and traded with the natives on shore: their numbers had grown to something like five hundred ships each year by the end of the sixteenth century and continued to increase. Even without recorded instances of disease, the law of statistics would require that a certain portion of these visitors be sick men. (p. 23)

By the time the English began colonization the population had already dropped precipitously.

Looking at evidence from accounts by colonizers, Jennings begins to piece together a record of the decline of native populations. In the French contacts with the Hurons and the New England contacts with the Pequots, Wampanoag and Massachusetts tribes, the account is always the same. One in ten remained by the late 17th C. Evidence points to the conclusion that this decline continued into the 17th C, during which time colonizers Carolina pointed to the same declines.

If the decline of native populations was this great, then original numbers need to be revised upwards. Based upon the work of work of Henry F. Dobyns, Jennings concludes that there were 90-112 million natives in the Western Hemisphere and 10-12 million lived north of the Rio Grande. As he opens, so he concludes:

The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one. Jamestown, Plymouth, Salem, Boston, Providence, New Amsterdam, Philadelphia - all grew upon sites previously occupied by Indian communities. So did Quebec and Montreal and Detroit and Chicago. The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made was by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers. (p. 30)

Chapter 3: Reciprocal Discovery

Jennings rejects "settlement" as a descriptive term for the initial European contact with the Americas, pointing out instead that it was "exploitation" that drove the Europeans to the Americas. "Among the early European visitors, residence was merely a means of increasing the efficiency of exploitation." As the cases of Navaraez, Coronado and de Soto all show, dispersed native populations would simply not do. Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs, rather, is the prototype for exploitation by using the strength of the native populations against them.

From the first contact, however, it was necessary for the Europeans to enter into an alliance with the native populations. The Europeans did not know how to make the best of the native land, how to live off the land and survive the environment. Often abandoned by their own European civilizations to fend for themselves, early European inhabitants had to rely upon natives, with their superior technology, to survive. But the dependency eventually went both ways:

The "conquest of America" was a mingling of conflict and cooperation, in which the Indians became not merely weaker than Europeans generally but also dependent upon them. This process was further complicated because at particular times and places, and for specific purposes, particular Europeans were dependent upon particular Indians. (p. 39)

Particularly as Indians entered into trade relationships, the balance shifted toward the Europeans and Indians became consumers for the European market economy. Growing dependent on firearms and alcohol, Indians lost ground to the Europeans quickly as they lost their Neolithic skills through disuse. For the Europeans, contact was much more benign. Once they learned to make canoes, moccasins, buckskin clothing, and shelters, they no longer needed the Indians. Yet both sides where changed by the interactions brought about by continued contact.

Chapter 4: Savage Heathen

As Nicholas Canny pointed out, the English came to the Americas after having fought the wars to subdue the Irish. The Irish were seen by the British as pagans, "savages" and barbarians. The warfare waged in Ireland was the precursor to was to be waged against the Indians in America.

The protestant encounter with the natives was also a source of derogation of native peoples to the status of savages. Europeans viewed the Indians nakedness, their lack of sexual boundaries (premarital sex and berdaches) as an abomination, and their ceremonies were viewed as devil worship. Ironically, the miraculous occurrences of the Indians and the Europeans were similar. As David Hall would point out, the Europeans lived in a World of Wonders as well.

There are ways in which the cosmology of the natives was perhaps "superior" to that of the Europeans. In the case of medicine, at least, the Indians knew of the uses of many plants that Europeans would only discover later. Yet it was the medicine man that invoked the ire of the European colonists. Breaking him was breaking the community. Whereas the Catholic French could distinguish between religion and medicine and often used native remedies to good effect, the Puritan English did no such thing. For them, savage heathen medicine and religion were part and parcel.

Chapter 6: Unstable Symbiosis

European and Indian societies were curiously compatible in the both were commodity exchange cultures. The inter-societal exchange, generally referred to as the beaver trade, was possible because the Europeans encountered a people who already had a highly developed gender-based divisions of labor. Existing patterns of intertribal trade were transformed by contact with Europeans. As Indians added commercial hunting to their subsistence hunting patterns, they became increasingly integrated into a world market. While the Neo-Europeans were able to use the profits from pelts to offset their unfavorable balance of trade with Europe, the combination of endemic disease, alcoholism and trade wars launched the native populations on a downward spiral of self-destructive fury typified by the Beaver Wars. Taking on the aspect of an extractive industry in a "third world nation," Indians vied with each other to provide furs to the Europeans at great labor cost to themselves.

Jennings attacks another myth surrounding Native Americans, that of the lazy savage. He destroys this image by describing the arduous labor needed (by both men and women) to get the finished pelts to the European traders. First they built canoes, then they journeyed long distances over difficult waterways and terrain to reach hunting grounds, trapped the animals and then brought them all the way back to their villages to be cured and treated by the women. Rather than loafing around the village, the males were resting up for the next hunt as the women processed the skins.

As native populations became more deeply engrossed as producers for the world fur market, they also grew as consumers of European good. They certainly sought steel tools and weapons, but they also traded for European woolen goods, thereby fueling the British textile industry until the colonial demand could take over. Jennings asks whether or not the Indian trade enabled the proletarianization of the English working class.

Although the trade was as eagerly sought by Indians as by Europeans, its effects upon the two societies were conditioned diversely by preexisting traits of their cultures. In the long run it helped to make Europeans dominant and Indians dependent. It stimulated European merchants while destroying Indian crafts and impoverishing the tribes. It opened to Europeans vast new territories and provided the means for their acquisition, but it set the Indians against each other in a deadly competition for subordinate supremacy that ultimately resulted in the dispossession of them all. (p. 102)

The indian culture of gift giving undermined the ability to accumulate capital, hence the Indians never became merchants (though they were clearly traders). By rejecting capitalism, the Indians were consigned to the lowest of the low in an emerging capitalist world order.

Chapter 9: Savage War

Jennings points to the myth of savage warfare as opposed to the "civilized" way of war practiced in the west. He makes it clear that European really had no call to claim that natives had any exclusive claim to brutality in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Focusing on the cruelty inflicted by natives on settlers misses a great deal of cruelty inflicted by Europeans on each other and on the natives as well.

Before the introduction of European weapons, the intertribal wars claimed few casualties. In fact, Europeans like Roger Williams noted that the Indians' wars were far less bloody than European wars. Warriors like Captain John Underhill looked with disdain upon them as a skulking way of war.

Another characteristic of native warfare was that they rarely killed women and children, preferring rather to take them captives and adopt them as part of the tribe. Nor did the Indians engage in total war, destroying the crops and property of their enemies. These latter two characteristics of Western warfare were taught the Indians by Europeans, as were many of the traits commonly thought of as typical of "savage war". Other traits, such as the taking and displaying of the heads of one's vanquished enemies were practiced in both societies prior to contact. Sir Humphrey Gilbert's activities in Ireland provide a good example of the practice in Europe. Pointing out the similarities between medieval knights and indian warriors, he makes a point of concluding with a round condemnation of the deleterious effects of nationalism.