About the Book
The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as a series of cultural conflicts and misunderstandings based on a vast gulf of difference. Nancy Shoemaker turns this notion on its head, showing that Indians and Europeans shared common beliefs about their most fundamental realities--land as national territory, government, record-keeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body.
Before they even met, Europeans and Indians shared perceptions of a landscape marked by mountains and rivers, a physical world in which the sun rose and set every day, and a human body with its own distinctive shape. They also shared in their ability to make sense of it all and to invent new, abstract ideas based on the tangible and visible experiences of daily life. Focusing on eastern North America up through the end of the Seven Years War, Shoemaker closely reads incidents, letters, and recorded speeches from the Iroquois and Creek confederacies, the Cherokee Nation, and other Native groups alongside British and French sources, paying particular attention to the language used in cross-cultural conversation.
Paradoxically, the more American Indians and Europeans came to know each other, the more they came to see each other as different. By the end of the 18th century, Shoemaker argues, they abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity and instead developed new ideas rooted in the conviction that, by custom and perhaps even by nature, Native Americans and Europeans were peoples fundamentally at odds. In her analysis, Shoemaker reveals the 18th century roots of enduring stereotypes Indians developed about Europeans, as well as stereotypes Europeans created about Indians. This powerful and eloquent interpretation questions long-standing assumptions, revealing the strange likenesses among the inhabitants of colonial North America.
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
