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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, editors. Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2004. Pp. xxi, 336. Cloth $65.00, paper $22.95.
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| This collection of thirteen original essays travels the history of Pennsylvania's relations with American Indians from the Dutch and Swedish settlements of the 1630s through William Penn's founding of Pennsylvania and the Seven Years' War to end in the post-Revolutionary War period, at which point Pennsylvania had only a few Indian communities remaining within its borders. As editors William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter observe in their introduction, Pennsylvania has a peculiar Indian history. Lauded by outsiders and self-promoted by insiders, Pennsylvania's Indian affairs acquired a reputation for fair dealing, a perception consolidated in public memory by the powerful imagery of friendly relations appearing in two paintings, Benjamin West's William Penn's Treaty with the Indians (1771) and Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom (1826). In contrast to these Pennsylvania mythmakers' portrayals of satisfied Indians peaceably negotiating land transactions with the colony's legendary founder, Pennsylvania may have had the most violent, bloodthirsty borderlands of any of the original British colonies. Not coincidentally, Pennsylvania today has an inconsequential Indian population. The editors report that in "the 2000 federal census, among all fifty states and the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania ranks last in the percentage of its population classified as Native American," and moreover, Pennsylvania has no Indian reservations (p. xix). |
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