About the Book
The histories told about American Indian and European encounters on the frontiers of North America are usually about cultural conflict. This book takes a different tack by looking at how much Indians and Europeans had in common. In six chapters, this book compares Indian and European ideas about land, government, recordkeeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body. Focusing on eastern North America in the 18th century, up through the end of the
Seven Years War in 1763, each chapter discusses how Indians and Europeans shared some core beliefs and practices. Paradoxically, the more American Indians and Europeans came to know each other, the more
they came to see each other as different, so different indeed that they appeared to be each other's opposite. European colonists thought Indians a primitive people, laudable perhaps for their simplicity but not destined to possess and rule over North America. Simultaneously, Indians came to view Europeans as their antithesis, equally despicable for their insatiable greed and love of money. Thus, even though American Indians and Europeans started the 18th century with ideas in common, they
ended the century convinced of their intractable differences. The 18th century was a crucial moment in American history, as British colonists and their Anglo-American successors rapidly pushed westward,
sometimes making peace and sometimes making war with the powerful Indian nations-the Iroquois and Creek confederacies, Cherokee nation, and other Native peoples-standing between them and the west. But the 18th century also left an important legacy in the world of ideas, as Indians and Europeans abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity so as to instead develop new ideas rooted in the conviction that, by custom and perhaps even by nature, Native Americans and
Europeans were peoples fundamentally at odds.
About the Author :
Nancy Shoemaker is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. She is the author of American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century and editor of Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies, and American Indians.
Review :
"Nancy Shoemaker's A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America illuminates a fascinating paradox: that Indians and Europeans initially viewed themselves and the world around them in strikingly similar ways, but by the end of the eighteenth century they had together created a 'fiction of irresolute difference,' codified in racial terms of 'red' and 'white.' In lucid prose, blessedly free of jargon, Shoemaker thus
argues convincingly that ideas and categories of race did not originate out of mindless hatred or immediate misunderstanding but appeared only after divisions over territory and sovereignty had become intractable.
Difference did not breed conflict, conflict bred difference."--Journal of Southern History
"Shoemaker's short and broad-reaching book is ambitious and rewarding. It turns a historiographic paradigm on its head, covers in a relatively brief work many different cultures and encounters, and grapples with primary sources as well as the deepening historiography."---Net Reviews
"In these elegantly written and scrupulously documented essays, Shoemaker persuasively argues that an acknowledgement of commonly held ideas is essential to understanding the construction of difference. This alone should encourage scholars in the field to rethink the encounter, no mean achievement for any book."--American Historical Review
"With clarity, economy, and penetrating insight, Nancy Shoemaker has crafted a very important book. It is also an eminently teachable one: it will introduce students to broad patterns in Indian-white relations and provoke wide-ranging conversations on essential topics in cross-cultural contact."--Journal of American History
"Shoemaker has mined primary sources and relied on asking new questions of old evidence to find sometimes striking parallels between Indian and European viewpoints."--Western Historical Quarterly
"Shoemaker turns several historical paradigms on their heads and challenges her readers to reconsider deeply rooted assumptions about the importance of cultural differences between Europeans and Indians, the nature of cross-cultural communication and interaction, and the origin of shared constructions of race. In the process, she persuasively argues that it is essential to acknowledge the construction of difference and identity. The insight alone should gain
the volume a wide readership and encourage scholars to rethink not only the American encounter, but cross-cultural interaction in other times and places."--New York History
"Scholars often forget that, as human beings, Indians and Europeans had much in common: they were men and women with families who used their five senses to explain the world around them; and they organized themselves into distinctive groups and built relationships within groups and across groups. Shoemaker's study is invaluable because it brings those similarities to light and argues for Indian agency in using that common experiential language to articulate
and magnify differences between Indian and European/Euro-American cultures."--Journal of Social History
"Ambitious and rewarding."--H-Atlantic
"Shoemaker's innovative argument and perceptive observations distinguish her book....This slim volume should be required reading for graduate students and sophisticated undergraduates alike, as well as scholars of Native Americans, colonialism, race, and identity."--William and Mary Quarterly
"Ranging widely and insightfully through the eighteenth-century Indian country, Nancy Shoemaker reveals the interplay of difference and similarity that constructed race in colonial America. In lucid prose and with keen judgment, she offers a fascinating and compelling new interpretation of the Indian adaptation to colonial expansion."--Alan S. Taylor, author of American Colonies: The Settlement of North America
"Nancy Shoemaker, in this rich and engaging study of the records of eighteenth-century Indian treaties and treaty councils, gives us a history in which Native Americans and Europeans both do the talking. Meeting upon the treaty ground, Europeans and Indians not only noticed, but expounded upon, the things they shared with one another: from bodies to families, from the distributing of power to the consecrating of landscapes. But these very commonalities, far
from providing for agreement, actually served as points of departure for hardening ideas about difference, which was increasing seen as a matter of race. The very understandings that Europeans and Native
Americans most shared made all the more intractable their deteriorating relations."--Gregory Evans Dowd, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"In refreshingly clear prose, Nancy Shoemaker shows how Europeans and Native Americans together built the stereotypes and half-truths that defined each other as inherently different kinds of people. The central irony-indeed tragedy-of her tale is that the supposed differences could never have appeared so clear if the cultures involved had not actually been so much alike. A Strange Likeness is a sophisticated contribution to our understanding
of how race performs its ugly work."--Daniel K. Richter, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
"Nancy Shoemaker brings vividly to life an eighteenth-century world in which shared modes of remembering, of categorizing people and land, and of thinking about the human place in the universe complicated and facilitated relations between Americans of European and Indian descent. In place of simple incomprehension and hatred, she offers us a view of a world of intricate and fluid meanings."--Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University
"Chris Jones offers a lucid account...[M]akes a significant contribution to twentieth-century literary history."--Contemporary Literature
