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Review
| A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America, by Nancy Shoemaker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 224 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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| The premise of Nancy Shoemaker's A Strange Likeness is refreshingly different from most of the literature on the relationship between Native Americans and Europeans. Instead of focusing on the conflict of cultures, as do most scholars, she digs down to "a bedrock of shared ideas" between the two traditions. Indians and Europeans shared metaphors, categories of the world, and other ways of thinking that helped them communicate regardless of their cultural differences. This communication, Shoemaker argues, served to distinguish the cultures from one another, and over the course of the eighteenth century, Indians and Europeans constructed identities that emphasized the differences. In her analysis, Shoemaker relies on "written talks," or European transcripts of councils with Indians. What Indians and Europeans said to each other not only allows for a glance into their deeply held ideas about the world but also gives the reader a sense of the new ideas that emerged from their dialogue. It is here that the book makes its greatest contribution to our understanding of Indian-European relations. Instead of presenting the colonial experience as one of simple misunderstanding, incomprehension, and atrocity, Shoemaker's colonial world is inhabited with peoples with logic, rationality, and humanity. They communicate with each other, and in the process, construct new knowledge of the world around them and who they are as people. In this view, both Indians and Europeans are actors in and makers of the colonial world. |
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The book focuses on the period of intense treaty making and record keeping from around 1700 to the aftermath of the Seven Years' War in the late 1760s, a time when power relations were not yet so clearly in favor of the Europeans, thus compelling them to negotiation. Geographically, the focus is on the east coast; as Shoemaker points out, the British were the most meticulous record keepers of all the European powers. Topically, the volume covers a lot of ground: land, kings, writing, alliances, gender and race. This variety of themes in such a few pages works well to provide an overview of commonalities between Indian and European thought. An instructor can easily use one chapter out of the book as a point of departure for classroom discussion on commonalities between Indian and European cultures. This discussion is of great urgency, because students tend to have very strong preconceived notions about what it meant to be "Indian" or "white" in the colonial world. |
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While providing an insightful interpretation of similarity in colonial America, the topical variety leaves the reader wanting for more clear analysis of how and why exactly Indians and Europeans chose to emphasize difference. The title suggests that difference was increasingly seen as a matter of race, but the chapter on race does not fully convince this reader of race as the determining category. The more convincing argument comes in the conclusion: the growing emphasis on difference between the cultures resulted from the fact that by the mid-eighteenth century Europeans and Native Americas increasingly found themselves in competition for the same land. Emphasizing the inferiority of Indians justified European conquest while Indians created their own set of stereotypes to characterize Europeans as different from them. What is so instructive about this conclusion is that both Indians and Europeans have been integral in the creation of the still-prevailing stereotypes. All in all, A Strange Likeness is an engaging study that uses written records of the eighteenth century for a purpose often overlooked in the study of Indians and Europeans, their commonalities. The volume establishes its goal in clear prose, addressing a variety of topics. As such, the book can be easily adapted to the classroom, either in its entirely or in parts. |
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| California State Polytechnic University at Pomona |
Paivi Hoikkala |
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