Forum Essay: Reply

Of Lively Exchanges and Larger Perspectives

JEREMY ADELMAN and STEPHEN ARON

Scholarship on American frontiers, writes Evan Haefeli, "retains much of the narcissism of Frederick Jackson Turner's celebratory thesis." Our efforts to combine local and imperial perspectives and to distinguish between borderlands and frontiers, he fears, may have added nothing "more than a colorful new overcoat to the old [triumphalist] story of nation building." Even more accusingly, John Wunder and Pekka Hämäläinen condemn our "borderlands to borders" framework as "process history," shot through with the imperialist and ethnocentric weaknesses of Turner's thesis. Worse still, claim Wunder and Hämäläinen, we muffle our historiographic allegiance to Turner. Yet, like Turner, we fail to recognize the agency of Indian peoples, causing us to oversimplify a "complex historical phenomenon" and "deny the unbroken past" that is supposedly fundamental to Indian peoples.	1
We have no interest in turning this response into a refighting of battles over the ghost of Frederick Jackson Turner or a rehashing of skirmishes among historians of the American West over the advantages of "place" or "process" (which we think starts with a false dichotomy).1 As we admit in the article, we stand with (and on) Turner in the concern for periodizing European expansionism. Our emphasis on the often unexpected mixings that frontiers and borderlands produced, however, seems anything but "sanitized." Nor should our attempt to frame the history of colonialism in North America be seen as "celebratory." Its purpose was to explain how the process of conquest moved across North America from various directions and to analyze some of the forces that altered assorted expansionist designs. Still, were we to lay our historiographic cards on the table, we might also have acknowledged our indebtedness to Turner's vision of an American history that embraces comparative frontier experiences. This debt, however, we felt was better paid to Herbert Bolton, whose "Epic of Greater America" inspires readers to ponder the common and divergent histories of Western Hemisphere states and societies.	2
In "Borderlands to Borders," we limited our case studies to North America, but we invited efforts to extend the conversation to include all American histories and historians. So, we particularly welcome Christopher Ebert Schmidt-Nowara's contribution to this Forum. He reminds us to avoid a too insular historiography, for Turner, Bolton, and other English-speaking historians were/are "not alone in theorizing the history of empire and cultural connections in the Americas." Undoubtedly, greater attention to the writings of Spanish-speaking intellectuals and social scientists is required if we are to escape from parochial historiographies. More important, they are essential if we are to grasp the multiple trajectories that American places experienced in the transition from Indian countries to European colonies and independent nation-states. Certainly, Schmidt-Nowara's discussion of Cuban intellectuals, including some who were Turner's contemporaries, suggests the similar and different ways that Caribbean and mainland writers conceived the legacy of European colonialism. At the same time, our approach (not the same as a paradigm) to North American histories is informed by historiographies of Canada and Mexico, which have for generations stressed the diversities of cross-cultural transformations. We take seriously Schmidt-Nowara's recommendation that any "greater epic" will require attention to non-U.S. historiographies and to how historical traditions are themselves the progeny of comparative myth-making.	3
In some respects, the bifurcated vision of British and Spanish colonialism articulated by Cubans in the late nineteenth century accords with what prevailed in North America. Here, however, the silence in our polycolonial and multinational historiography concealed not Turner or Bolton but Francis Parkman. Although Parkman's name did not appear in the text or notes of our article, he best expressed what nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans considered the basic differences between colonial regimes in the Americas. On most subjects, withering criticism has discredited Parkman's work, but his characterization of intercultural relations still survives in mutated form. That mutation, in our view, involves the assignment of essential and static features to colonial societies and their frontiers. Parkman, of course, was indebted to an even older myth—that of the "Black Legend"—and it should be clear that we are attempting to challenge this type of comparative history.2	4
One way to contest the Parkmanesque view is to stress the ways in which Indians shaped colonial ventures, thereby altering the political economy of imperialism. This, in turn, should highlight the contingencies in Atlantic history. Instead of the straightforward transmission of colonial projections, we maintained that the persistence of Indian peoples and imperial rivalries continuously transformed the plans of Europe's empire builders. That transformation, we argued, was most conspicuous in borderlands, where the competing claims of expansionist powers lent Indian peoples an additional weapon in their struggles to protect homelands. With the eclipse of imperial competition and the emergence of new states in North America, however, we saw a weakening of the transformations and negotiations associated with borderlands. In the United States especially, the eviction of Indian inhabitants followed the establishment of bordered lands. Mexico and Canada embarked as well on their own versions of defining the meanings and hardening the boundaries of membership in emerging political communities. That did not mean that North American Indians stopped resisting their reduction to dispossession and dependency. To the contrary, the persistence of Indian peoples and their politics affirms the ultimate failure of exclusionary strategies—as the remarkable achievements in Chiapas and British Columbia exemplify. Contracted though today's "Indian countries" may be, the survival of Indians as peoples and nations nourishes their perception of continuity between anti-colonial struggles past and ongoing.	5
Persistence and perception, however, do not an unbroken past make. To be sure, that conception of history is fundamental to many Indians, and, to understand the perspective of Indians, past and present, an appreciation for the sense of an ongoing anti-colonial struggle is necessary. But to reconstruct the history of colonialism from all perspectives demands awareness of deep changes in the power relations between Indians and their neighbors. Or do historians Wunder and Hämäläinen really believe that the remappings of North America which brought steep reductions in the size of Indian countries registered no essential changes or watersheds in the history of intercultural relations?3	6
That said, we concede the shortcomings of our essay in giving adequate play to the full dimensions of Indian agency. In stressing imperial rivalries as a shaping factor in North American intercultural relations, we have unfairly limited the scope and space of Indian actions in fashioning the character of frontiers and forestalling the contraction of their countries. If Indians come across as nameless pawns in a grand chess game, then any "greater American" history is diminished. Adding the names of individual leaders might help, but a cosmetic sprinkling of these throughout the text would not alone redress the too reactive quality of Indian leadership in our telling.	7
Our essay did not presume to cover all facets of cross-cultural interaction. We did not mean to suggest that imperial competition was all that mattered, that only borderlands produced accommodationist frontiers. As Haefeli correctly observes, the classic example of intercultural conciliation, what Richard White has termed the "middle ground" between French and Algonquians in the Great Lakes, emerged long before British traders entered the area. In the larger perspective, the British presence in North America worried French administrators even then, but for French traders and their Algonquian partners the inter-imperial dimension was a distant concern. Likewise, in the lower Missouri Valley and across the Plains to the Rio Grande and beyond, as Wunder and Hämäläinen contend, inclusive frontiers were not exclusively produced by Indians' ability to manipulate borderland exigencies.	8
Indeed, although the issue is not raised in the published responses to our essay, we should underscore that inclusive frontiers were by no means synonymous with accommodation and conciliation. In borderlands, Indians extracted concessions that brought intercultural relations onto more common ground. But the extended cohabitations that characterized other inclusive frontiers could be as violent and exploitative as more exclusive ones. For Indians, inclusion often meant coerced sex and harsh labor.4	9
Moreover, before and after Europeans invaded North America, Indians pursued expansions of their own. Any comprehensive study of North American transformations should probably begin with the pre-colonial spread and reverberations of the Aztec regime—south and north. In the period on which our essay focuses, the Lakotas' takeover of northern Plains lands furnishes an example of Indian migrations and conquests that had little to do with European rivalries. A more complete reckoning of intercultural relations must, then, heed the power of Indian peoples to set relations on their own terms (at least through the eighteenth century), as well as consider the particulars of demography, economy, and environment.	10
Europeans were not the only expansionist powers and their imperial rivalries were not the sole parent of accommodationist frontiers, but we maintain that borderland competition was significant to the preservation of the common ground found by Indians and Europeans in the Great Lakes, the lower Missouri Valley, and the Greater Rio Grande region. True, in Iroquoia, the rivalry between French and British sowed division within Indian villages. Elsewhere, too, factionalism undermined the efforts of Indian leaders to build consensus. Still, borderlands also constrained European powers and forced concessions. "It was the English," writes Richard White, who gave the Algonquians of the Great Lakes "the freedom to extort this hybrid exchange system from the French."5 At those times when French authorities felt more secure, they abandoned the syncretic rituals of the middle ground and sought to impose their own terms of trade and diplomacy. British pressure and Algonquian resistance, however, restored the protocols of the middle ground. That was true of the British too, who, thinking themselves free of imperial rivals, treated Ohio Valley Indians as conquered people in the wake of the Seven Years' War. Once again, Indian defiance and the rise of the American republic brought the British back toward a middle ground that prevailed so long as imperial competition bolstered the position of Great Lakes Indians and checked U.S. expansionism. To the southwest, Wunder and Hämäläinen themselves illustrate very well how Spanish concerns about French, British, and later U.S. encroachments in northern New Spain contributed to the adoption of new kinds of arrangements with the Apaches and Comanches.	11
We wrap up this lively exchange with a clarification and a reiteration of the larger perspective that informs our venture into "greater American" history: to acknowledge that Indians did not triumph in their struggle against Europeans is not to consign them to a history without agency. In North America, however, the political and economic passage from empires to nation-states and from colonial commerce to capitalist property altered the ground rules for the defense of the identities and livelihoods of the peoples-in-between. Indians, métis, and mestizos shaped these transformations, even though they—and we—might not have liked the outcomes.	12
Jeremy Adelman, an associate professor of history and director of the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, earned his doctorate from Oxford University. He is the author of Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914 (1994), and Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (1999). Adelman is currently researching a book on Latin America since World War II. Stephen Aron received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now an associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (1996) and is completing a book on the lower Missouri Valley frontier. Together, Adelman and Aron have edited a collection of essays entitled Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants (forthcoming) and are collaborating with Natalie Zemon Davis, Steve Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, Robert Tignor, and Michael Tsin on a world history textbook to be published by W. W. Norton. Notes 1 Although Patricia Nelson Limerick has led the charge for a "new western history" that champions "place" over "process," her disavowal of frontier does not in itself amount to a rejection of process-oriented history. "Conquest," after all, is also a process. True, Limerick sees conquest as ongoing, which she contrasts with "opened" and "closed" frontiers. In addition, Limerick urges western historians to focus their attentions on the current, if uncertainly defined, boundaries of the American West. But this sense of place reads regional boundaries backwards. We would argue that this brings an anachronistic perspective to the study of colonialism in North America and removes the process of border shifting and setting from the gaze of historians. For references to relevant works on these matters, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," AHR 104 (June 1999): 814 n. 1; to which should be added Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997). 2 In the deceptively simple and unvarying formulation of Francis Parkman, "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him." See Parkman, "The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century," in France and England in North America, David Levin, ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1983), 1: 432. 3 As Robert Berkhofer has explained in an essay that grappled with this issue, "one can believe that others believe certain things as facts, but one need not accept those versions of the past as factual in one's own cognitive system, even if one extends moral sympathy and understanding." Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "Cultural Pluralism versus Ethnocentrism in the New Indian History," in Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History (New York, 1987), 42. 4 For an excellent exposition of the various forms that inclusive frontiers took, see Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, Conn., 1999), esp. 39–99. 5 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991), 119.

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