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

New Worlds for All describes myriad ways in which Indigenous influences shaped the European-American society that emerged from the colonial period. Indigenous Americans exerted their influence most powerfully in the three centuries following Columbus’s arrival in 1492 (3).

Considering what modern readers know about how the larger story unfolded, it requires an imaginative leap to appreciate the precariousness of Europeans’ early settlements and the degree to which they depended on Indigenous assistance for their survival. Indigenous Americans taught Europeans to plant corn, which “played a major role in Americanizing the diets of European settlers” (52). Indigenous Americans also helped Chesapeake-area colonists learn how to cultivate tobacco, a lucrative crop that allowed Virginia to develop into Britain’s most prosperous mainland colony. As a supplement to agriculture, both subsistence and commercial, many Europeans hunted for food. Hunting in Europe had always been more of a “gentleman’s sport” than a way of life; colonists had to acquire Indigenous skills and adopt Indigenous practices (56). When they got sick, as they often did, Europeans relied on Indigenous remedies and healing practices. European travelers, in fact, often praised Indigenous Americans for their medical knowledge. Calloway does not dwell at great length on specific Indigenous contributions to the modern world, but he does note, for instance, that in some parts of the United States “itinerant Indian physicians remained common well into the twentieth century” (42).

Indigenous Americans helped early settlers survive. Ironically contributing to their own eventual displacement, Indigenous Americans provided many of the methods by which Europeans expanded into the continental interior. In a wilderness filled with rivers, Europeans relied on canoes, including the impressive birchbark canoe used by Northeastern tribes. When they emigrated by land, Europeans took advantage of “large grassy corridors like that of the Shenandoah Valley,” which remained “free of undergrowth” thanks to ‘controlled fires” consistent with “Indian burning practices” (19). On a continent plagued by competing empires and ancient tribal animosities, Europeans and Indigenous Americans fought against and with one another. When Europeans failed to incorporate Indigenous fighting styles, as British General Edward Braddock did in 1755, the results proved deadly.

Europeans, of course, never entirely abandoned European-style warfare–mass infantry, artillery, sieges, etc. Instead, they learned “not one but many ways of waging war in America” (112).

The nature of colonial-era warfare itself testifies to the intermingling and intimacy that prevailed in many early American communities. Europeans and Indigenous Americans lived close to one another–and sometimes with one another. Therefore, conflicts often assumed the character of a civil war. King Philip’s War of 1675-76, for instance, is perhaps best described as a war between and among different tribes in New England. Based on casualties as a percentage of population, it was “the bloodiest war in American history” (100). Likewise, Europeans who lived for many years among Indigenous Americans sometimes fought against their former kin. At the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, a Virginia militiaman identified his brother among the dead Shawnee. Throughout the colonial period, few Europeans would dare go to war without Indigenous allies. From the late-17th century onward, every major war featured Europeans and Indigenous Americans on both sides.

The “Indian imprint” on American society extends as far as language, ideas, and actual human beings. Europeans had to learn new words to describe all that was new in their world. On the Gulf Coast, English settlers adopted the word bayou from the French, who themselves had adapted it from the Choctaw word bayuk (178). While there is no evidence for direct Iroquois influence on the United States Constitution, there is substantial evidence that Indigenous Americans enjoyed a degree of liberty and practiced a kind of egalitarianism that impressed thoughtful colonists, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Finally, Europeans and Indigenous Americans had many children together. Due to the hardening of attitudes in the 19th century, many descendants felt compelled to hide their multiracial identities. Still, these unions gave rise to generations.

One can scarcely identify an element of early American society that remained untouched by Indigenous peoples. Indeed, as Calloway asserts, early American history “makes no sense without Indians” (199).

Opposing narratives of Indigenous-European relations have appeared in two different forms. First, there is the triumphant discovery-and-civilization narrative that prevailed for decades in American schools and popular culture. According to this narrative, European colonists tamed a wilderness and began the inexorable march of progress in which Indigenous Americans played no meaningful role except as “savages” in need of displacement. Second, there is the conquest-of-paradise narrative which depicts Europeans as genocidal invaders and Indigenous Americans as helpless victims who had their idyllic lives destroyed by capitalism and racism. Calloway argues that both narratives are simplistic and inconsistent with the historical record.

Although the second narrative has largely supplanted the first, Calloway addresses both sources of misconception, including lingering errors derived from the first narrative. Notwithstanding “[p]opular stereotypes and many history books,” for instance, Indigenous Americans were not nomads. The horsemen and buffalo-hunters of the plains do not represent all Indigenous American peoples, many of whom lived in settled communities and relied on agriculture long before Europeans arrived (136). Maps in modern textbooks often locate Native tribes in places where they did not live, or did not yet live, ignoring the degree of forced displacement many tribes endured even before the 19th-century removals. Contrary to “Hollywood stereotypes,” Indigenous raiders were not unusually violent or cruel. Nor did Indigenous Americans always identify themselves as “Indians” or even as members of a particular tribe; both of these identities are European impositions. On the whole, Indigenous influences on early American society “have often been ignored, forgotten, and allowed to fade from the nation’s history” (201).

Calloway also corrects numerous errors that plague the prevailing conquest-of-paradise narrative. Pre-contact North American communities, like all human societies, suffered from both disease and violence. Calloway notes that “[i]n a very real sense […] America did exist as a new world for Europeans” (7). Whatever imperial governments might have hoped or planned, ordinary European emigrants did not think of themselves as agents of genocide. Many Europeans, in fact, both in and out of government, tried to live in peace with Indigenous Americans, and some succeeded. Europeans, “[c]ontrary to modern stereotypes,” were not “hopelessly out of touch with nature.” Many “possessed an extensive knowledge of plants and their properties” that constituted common ground and allowed them to work with Indigenous Americans, particularly in the area of healing and medicine (26-27). Finally, Calloway argues that the presence of Europeans and Indigenous Americans on both sides of every major colonial-era conflict suggests the inadequacy of an oppressor-oppressed, conquest-of-paradise approach to history.

In short, Calloway argues that any dichotomous narrative of European-Indigenous relations, which by definition obscures all cooperative and complex elements, lacks historical perspective.