Cultural Encounters between Native Americans and Europeans in Early America
When historians consciously realized the environmental turn in early American history, they started to discuss the relationships between colonists and Native Americans from the perspective of the Columbian Exchange. For traditional historians, they explored them mainly in terms of cultural differences or conflicts. Rarely had they discussed them from the perspective of Columbian Exchange. In discussing the relations between Indians and colonists, Kupperman considered the confrontation between them and urged historians to examine how English colonists and Indians learned from one another's cultures and technologies. However, this approach always simplified the white-Indians relationships, because it believed that colonist were stronger, while Native Americans were weaker. This was a kind of traditional Indian-Euro paradigm of colonial American history. It was Europe-centered that it greatly limited our understanding the relationships between Indians and colonists.[1]
Later, based on the reflection of her previous study of the cultural interaction between Native Americans and colonists, Kupperman claimed that the cultural encounters between them was not simply a matter of a stronger, more complex culture acting upon a weaker, simpler one. She argued that “English as supplicants rather than conquerors, doubtful and insecure rather than self-assured and dominant.”[2] Moreover, she dismissed the argument that the English were imperialists who only sought to exploit Native Americans for their resources. Instead, she strongly contended that ambivalence defined their relations. Then she pointed out that she sought “to recover the fear and uncertainty in which all sides lived.”[3] Kupperman reconsidered her work on the colonial encounters in early American history, which was very helpful for us to know the white – Indian relationships in an alternative way. However, a new and unbiased perspective to the early relationships between Native Americans and Europeans was still in need of further exploration.
In examining the relationships between Europeans and the Native Americans, Cronon was one of the most important representatives in applying the perspective of the Columbian Exchange into early American history. Noticing “economic and ecological imperialisms reinforced each other,” and “capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand,” Cronon pointed out how the whites and Indians contrasting understanding of property, wealth, and boundaries on the land brought not only cultural conflict but also an ecological transformation.[4] Then Cronon explained that the English notion of land as a private commodity rather than a public commons, which was totally different from the Native Americans. According to him, “it was the attachment of property in land to a marketplace, and the accumulation of its value in a society with institutionalized ways of recognizing abstract wealth . . . that committed the English in New England to an expanding economy that was ecologically transformative.”[5] Based on the different understandings of land, property between Europeans and Native Americans, Cronon examined how the Europeans’ capitalist mode of production, based on commodities, markets, and unlimited needs, supplanted the Indians’ subsistence mode of production which was oriented toward use value and limited need. Notions of private property replaced the Indians’ concept of usufruct rights, paving the way for land clearance, fencing, permanent settlements, and a pattern of resource exploitation based on limitless abundance.
To summon up, Cronon believed that “the intimate connection between grazing animals, plows, and fixed property lay at the heart of European agriculture, with far-reaching ecological consequences.”[6] If historians wanted to explain the colonial encounters in early America, they’d better focus on the exchanges of animals, plows, property and their ecological impact on the Native Americans in the New World. In the 1980s, Cronon was one of the pioneers in interpreting the relationships between Europeans and Native Americans from the perspective of Columbian Exchange. Cronon’s book was very challenging at that time, which greatly encouraged historians to reconsider colonial encounters between Native Americans and colonists Following Cronon, Virginia Anderson revisits the relationships between colonists and the Native Americans, although she mainly focuses on the differences of domesticating animals in early America. In her book, Anderson talks about the different perceptions on animals between the Native Americans and British colonists. According to her, the English preferred to tame animals and believed that “a person could remove a creature from the wild and transform it into property was firmly rooted in a larger set of English beliefs about the character of relations between people and animals.”[7] Based on Christianity with its doctrine of dominion, English colonists presumed that it was right and proper for humans to exercise dominion over animals. While for Indians, they preferred to hunt animals, because they held profoundly different views about the nature of hunting animals. They “aware of the power of animals spirits, native hunters treated prey with respect and performed rituals defined by reciprocity. Although not quite a relationship between equals, the connection between Indians and prey was not essentially hierarchical.”[8] Therefore, Anderson claims that “the order of Creature would be demonstrated most effectively not by deer with red collars, but by cattle, swine, and other livestock brought from England.”[9] As we can see, through examining the domestication of animals between Indians and colonists, Anderson renews our understanding of the relationships between Indians and colonists.
[1] See Karen Kupperman, Settling With the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-I640 (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980).
[2] Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 14.
[3] Ibid., x.
[4] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 160-1.
[5] Ibid., 79.
[6] Ibid., 147.
[7] Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 44.
[8] Ibid., 58.
[9] Ibid., 71.
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