Review

Gods of War, Gods of Peace by Russell Bourne is a thoroughly researched and carefully nuanced examination of the relationships between Euro-Americans and Native peoples between 1620 and 1830. Bourne's perspective on this dialectic relationship is two-pronged. He shows 1) that religion was a pivotal component of this interaction because "religious figures tended to arrive on the scene at times when the culture was profoundly threatened" and 2) that native peoples controlled their destinies in the first two hundred years of contact. Bourne employs a variety of sources including personal diaries, church records, and the narratives of literate native peoples who embraced Christianity. While native-white relations and religion are the primary focus of the text, Bourne includes a rich contextualization of history and employs ethnohistoric methods to reveal the multiple levels of interaction between the native inhabitants and the newcomers. In eight chapters Bourne provides a historiographic mosaic of early religious history, Native American cultures, North American empires (French and English), and the complexities of revolution. Bourne's treatment of Catholic North America (Chapters 3 and 4), the inner workings of Native politics on the eve of the American Revolution (Chapters 6 and 7), and how the ideologies of Moravians and Mormons made them successful missionaries to the Indian nations (Chapters 7 and 8) were especially compelling.	1
Gods of War, Gods of Peace is a useful text for college professors and high school teachers for use in advanced courses. This narrative will be useful to religious historians and scholars of the early republic who can employ the arguments presented to provide an additional level of analysis. Bourne structures the text to allow teachers to use individual chapters as free standing reading assignments and the book will undoubtedly be used frequently as an outside source in courses on the early republic. The text is very well written, impeccably researched, and framed in a manner to engender additional intellectual discourse on the first two centuries of Indian-white interaction. Bourne confronts racism, native conversions, Jesuit missiology, inter/intra tribal politics, and native agency and this confrontation is the major strength of this text. The main arguments are woven throughout the entire book and significant connections are carefully identified. With the exception of some repetitiveness, Bourne manages to avoid the flaws that frequently accompany treatments of native-white relations—ambiguity, confusion, and partisanship. Gods of War, Gods of Peace makes an important contribution to the literature and will generate important debate on white-Indian relations for the period from the arrival of the English colonists to the Jacksonian period.	2
Iona College James T. Carroll

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