Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640

Abstract

Settling with the Indians, while well-researched, is an extremely unsettling book. Written by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, it argues that English writers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries only thought of Indians as human beings but even admired some of their tribal cultural traits. The author's argument is convincing to be sure, primarily because the volume contains a remarkable number of direct quotations from these early writers about the New World. What makes the book convincing, however, also mars its literary quality. The study, in fact, appears to be little more than a series of quotes linked together by some rather strained sentences. There are other aspects that flaw the study. At the outset, Kupperman indicates that she will offer a portrait of English thought regarding the New World and its inhabitants. She also proposes that the study will give the readers some very important insights into the American Indian mental world (p. 2). While she does well with the English point of view, she fails to provide a complete picture of Indian attitudes and ideals. A case in point is the way Kupperman handles Indian environmental attitudes. She quotes, for example, three English writers who apparently were critical of Indian hunting practices. Two of the writers reported that Indians killed more deer than were needed to supply their people with meat and suggested that Indians lacked foresight in the management of game resources. The third writer stated that a group of Indians on occasion presented Englishmen with gifts of six or seven deer hides. This final quote seems to be a commentary on Indian generosity rather than on hunting, but that is another issue. Although she does mention the tribal backgrounds of the Indians in question or how the game was procured, Kupperman nevertheless asserts that Indians in general were not adverse to making massive changes in the natural world (p. 91). To support her claim of Indian improvidence, she states that the fires the tribes set to clear land for planting often raged out of control. In her efforts to avoid romanticizing Indian life, Kupperman simply reverts to an old stereotype of Indians as unthinking, superstitious primitives. Actually, Indians, as the early English writers attested, had a thorough knowledge of the region in which they lived. The deer hunters might have been utilizing a resource that was plentiful and in danger of extinction. Changes in Indian attitudes, as Calvin Martin pointed out in his excellent Keepers of the Game, occurred after massive changes in Indian societies, largely because of the deci-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 54 citations exist upstream.