Among the many problems with this interpretation was the very idea of Native American nations. The ensuing “alliance” was often reported in French accounts as being hierarchal, with the French having added another nation or nations to their North American empire. It was possible for people such as French missionaries or traders to move from the first category to the second, usually via a Native American ceremony that the French misinterpreted as formalizing a political and/or military alliance. He describes the world of the Anishinaabeg as having two categories for people: foreigners ( meyaagizid) and relatives ( inawemaagen). In part 1 of the book, Witgen reinterprets the first century of French contact with Native Americans to include a more compelling Native American perspective than we are used to seeing, even of late. The illusions of imperial power and authority that these ideas fueled, in fact, had much to do with the decisions made and actions taken by the French, and with the subsequent descriptions and interpretations of events by the British and Americans that succeeded them, and by historians centuries later. In the Native New World, discovery and conquest were real only in the minds of Europeans, which is not to say they were irrelevant to developments on the ground. While Witgen acknowledges that for some places in the Western Hemisphere the European perspective was not entirely fanciful, in Anishaabewaki-deep in the North American interior-a Native New World developed that connected “Native peoples with little or no contact with Europeans to an emerging world market economy” (p. 19). ![]() Those fantasies placed savage indigenous peoples as subordinates in the story of the creation by civilized Europeans of a New World in the Western Hemisphere. In the nineteenth century, Schoolcraft’s descriptions of such Native Americans as Flat Mouth helped inspire such works as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic, The Song of Hiawatha (1855)-an ode to the “vanishing” Indian-but in the twenty-first century they can be used, as Witgen explains, as a window into the Native American perspective, provided that the reader does not privilege the fantasies of European discovery and conquest on which they were based. ![]() Flat Mouth’s rejection of American paternalism and anger at the failure of the United States to honor its treaty obligations is described in contrast to Schoolcraft’s paternalism and sense of cultural superiority. In the prologue, Witgen describes an 1832 meeting between the Anishinaabeg leader Flat Mouth and a delegation of American officials that included the explorer and ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft. That he largely succeeds with the first and to some extent with the second is testimony to the effective mix of historical, ethnographic, and anthropological perspectives in his approach and to his creative and effective reinterpretation of the accounts provided by French and American traders, missionaries, and imperial officials operating in Anishinaabewaki: the lands occupied by the Algonquian-speaking Native Americans (Anishinaabeg) Witgen places at the heart of his story. sovereignty in the region to the middle of the nineteenth century. Witgen’s impressive book is ambitious in its attempt both to reorder our fundamental understanding of what was happening between the French and Native Americans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to push back the onset of effective U.S. ![]() This world-dominated by indigenous peoples-sprang from transformations brought about by the arrival of European traders and missionaries and the material goods and ideas they carried with them. In the past twenty years, historians of America’s colonial and early national periods have shattered the old eastern-centric narrative by looking into North America’s interior and presenting us with new ways of understanding what they call the “middle ground” the “Native Ground” the “divided ground” and now, in the words of Michael Witgen, the “Native New World.” Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America argues that characterizations-in both the past and present-of indigenous peoples in America’s colonial period as conquered or “vanishing” are illusory and ignore the evidence that, at least in the large area stretching from the upper Great Lakes to Hudson’s Bay, Europeans and Euro-Americans played only supporting roles in the creation of a Native New World. Reviewed by John Reda (Illinois State University) ![]() Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America.
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