Browsing by Subject "Indians"

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    Indian Letter to the Government
    (2011-11-03) Coy, Tommy
    Prior even to the Revolution, many Indian tribes in the Northwest Territory chose not to side with either the French or the British in the French and Indian War. The war was simple: land. The Indians just couldn’t wrap their heads around the constant bickering over land. The Indians view of “land” was quite different than that of the English and the French. Bickering and usage of the land was the major dispute, and because the Indians saw land as something shared, and the English settlers moving into this territory at the time of the letter (1771) saw it as property, disputes were inevitable. Constant battling between settlers and Indian tribes being on land the settlers saw as “their land” caused catastrophic consequences. This letter outlines the position of the tribes listed and their hopes for peace and friendship between the tribes and the settlers.
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    Review of Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650
    (MIT Press, 2001) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    Blackburn proposes a new reading of the encounter between Jesuit and Indian in seventeenth-century New France. A work of historical anthropology driven by the insights and agenda of colonial discourse studies, Harvest of Souls sets out to show how the Jesuit missionary reports (transcribed, translated, and published between 1896 and 1901 by Reu-ben G. Thwaites as The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents) were implicated in the practice of colonialism. Her method is to “examine the intent, effect, and meaning of the texts in their entirety” (as opposed to more narrowly focused ethnographic or historical readings), searching for and exposing the “sedimented meanings that inhabit the Jesuit texts” in order to “situate these meanings in relation to the politics of colonial-ism and conversion” (8, 11). The Relations were not “just the byproducts of a political process,” they were “a more integral component of the politics of colonialism, because they expressed the themes, ideas and ideologies that served domination and justified the colonial endeavor.”
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    Review of Jane T. Merritt's At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier
    (MIT Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    It has been more than a decade since White published The Middle Ground,a monumental study of the shared world of colonists and Indians in the Great Lakes region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1The middle ground, argued White, was called into existence by the mutual dependence of Indians and colonists. So long as Britain and France contested control of North America, a pragmatic accommodation prevailed. The persuasiveness and significance of White’s work is reflected by the abundance of middle grounds that scholars have since brought to light. Among the most recent contributions is Merritt’s At the Crossroads,which weds the middle ground to the transatlantic world of empires and subjects. Drawing largely on the wealth of sources in the Moravian mission archives, Merritt’s study provides a richly detailed look into the complex relations of Indian and white individuals and communities on the mid-Atlantic frontier from 1700 to 1763. At the Crossroads is one of a string of recent works—starting with Jon Sensbach ,A Seperate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840(Williamsburg, 1998)—that draws on the vast but virtually untapped sources of the relatively obscure Moravian communities to explore issues of race, culture, and religion in colonial and revolutionary America.