| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 297. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95.

This book deals with interaction between English colonists and North American Indians ("Americans") from the Roanoke settlement to the mid-seventeenth century. Karen Ordahl Kupperman is particularly struck that both sides "naturally sought to incorporate" the other "into their own systems" (p. 1). Although she avoids direct disagreement with other scholars, the author builds on her earlier work to challenge much received opinion. It is not true, she believes, that "American life was egalitarian and native political systems were consensual at the time of contact" (p. 38). The early colonists did not "dismiss the American natives as negligible or as cultureless savages" (p. 2). Nor did they denigrate them as racially inferior: "race . . . came later" (p. 75). Nor is it true that they "wished to sweep the Indians out of the way and did so without qualms" (p. 213). 1

Kupperman contends that "modern authors who portray the English as overconfident imperialists" rely uncritically on "clear and striking" epithets written by those who never left England (p. 11). Those who came to the colonies wrote more knowingly, and very ambivalently. Buffeted by rushes of fear and hope, their accounts oscillated accordingly. A brief report could be "contemptuous and admiring, hostile and friendly, self-confident and terrified" (p. x). . . .

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