DISPOSSESSING THE AMERICAN INDIAN

by Wilbur R. Jacobs ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1972

Studies of the American Indian have tended to be fragmented among the historian, the anthropologist and, most recently, the ecologist; rarely does a book attempt to integrate the three perspectives. Jacobs (History, Santa Barbara) tries and succeeds remarkably in this unusual and penetrating study of wilderness politics on the Great Lakes and the Ohio frontier in the century preceding the French and Indian Wars (1756-63) when the dynamics of white cultural imperialism first took shape. The first emissaries of white culture were fur trappers and traders bearing gifts. Gift-giving, as Jacobs shows, was a well-established instrument of diplomacy and soon both French and English colonialists were adept at ""Wampum and the Protocol of Treaty-Making."" As AngloFrench rivalries heightened, gifts were used by both European powers as, variously, bribes, subsidies to allies and modes of acculturation; when after 1763 these were abruptly cut off, the earliest panIndian resistance movement erupted into a frontier bloodbath culminating in ""Pontiac's Conspiracy"" which Jacobs calls ""Pontiac's War for Indian Independence."" In the bitter aftermath, racism rigidifled and the ""boundary-line concept"" that was eventually to become the reservation was introduced. The white man's gifts -- tools, clothing, weapons, toys and rum -- were reciprocated by bequests of land and furs; the latter led to the wholesale slaughter of beaver, bison, and otter which eventually eroded the economy of the Iroquois and Algonquin and created cultural and psychic dependencies. Jacobs grounds his explorations in a firm historiographic context reassessing in particular Frederick Jackson Turner's naive glamorization of early frontier heroes and the triumphal westward movement of the Europeans. Some comparisons with the dispossession of the Australian Aborigines and the resistance of the people of New Guinea to European encroachment round out this original and scholarly work.

Pub Date: July 1, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION