Book Review

Canada and the United States

This book is an important collection of original articles, so full of insight and information that summarizing it for this review seems an impossible task. The twenty articles have geographical and chronological breadth. They range from the northern reaches of North America to as far south as Virginia, with a preponderance of articles centering on the Great Lakes, especially Ojibwe peoples. Chronologically, the collection begins with the sixteenth century and ends in the twentieth; most articles deal with events occurring in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.	1
As editors Jennifer S. H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert state in their introduction, the theme tying these articles together is their sensitivity to context and perspective as parameters defining how we know what we know. The editors go even further and explicitly stake a claim on the postmodern frontier. Thankfully, none of the chapters stoop to the pretentious, empty jargon that self-proclaimed postmodernism occasionally gives license to. As in any collection, some of the essays seem weak and inconsequential, but at least they are jargon-free.	2
As a whole, this volume makes two significant contributions. First, each contributor's approach to his or her subject falls squarely within historiographic expectations, but the authors have put their doubts and questions upfront. Instead of overcoming contradictory sources in the archives or in the field to produce a coherent story told from a single angle, these authors show that real truth or meaning lies in the contradictions. Second, these authors lead the way in proliferating the kinds of sources, or texts, available for historical research: written documents in European and Native languages, language itself, oral histories, maps, anthropological fieldnotes, material culture, and photographs.	3
There were four essays that I found particularly interesting and worthy examples of what this volume achieves. Completely fascinating is Renée Fossett's "Mapping Inuktut: Inuit Views of the Real World," a study of Inuit mapping in the nineteenth century. The Inuits, especially women, were expert at putting their world into map form and, upon the request of European explorers, readily drew maps on paper. Fossett argues that the physical map was less important to the Inuit than the oral explanation that accompanied their drawing of the map and that Inuit maps puzzled Europeans because of the information conveyed: Inuit mapmakers measured distance as one day's journey and highlighted landmarks that lined the route but left off other topographical features. Not only does Fossett point out the value of maps as historical sources; she illustrates how the Inuits, and secondarily Europeans, conceived of their relationship to land and environment.	4
Frederic W. Gleach's "Controlled Speculation: Interpreting the Saga of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith" analyzes one of the most familiar incidents in the history of Indian-white relations and yet still manages to arrive at an illuminating interpretation. Smith's account of the three-day ceremony surrounding his captivity gives clues to Powhatan's true intentions, which Smith himself probably never grasped. At one point in the ceremony, Powhatan's people used cornmeal, kernels, and sticks to draw a map on the sand, explaining to Smith that "The Circle of meale signified their Country, the circles of corn the bounds of the Sea, and the stickes his Country." Applying anthropological insights to this and other ritual aspects of Smith's captivity, Gleach convincingly argues that this ceremony initiated Smith and his English compatriots into the Powhatan Confederacy as an allied, subject nation.	. . .