Why did I get this book?
A few years ago, a student asked me to supervise a direct reading focused on the environmental and ecological thought of indigenous people, with an emphasis on the Americas. This was a long ways outside my expertise but at the time we didn’t have someone on the faculty who was more proximate, so I said yes with some trepidation. (The student turned out to be fantastically responsible and engaged and we did a pretty decent job working together to get a good reading list going.) At the same time, a colleague of mine has inspired me to do more reading in the field of Native American history. So Ostler’s book came to my attention when travelling along both of those pathways.
Is it what I thought it was?
Actually, no—I thought of it as a general textbook on Native American history in North America from the 18th to the 19th Century but it’s more specific than that in terms of its central arguments—though it could serve terrifically well as a textbook in that sense. It’s doing what I thought but it’s also addressing a very specific historiographical conversation.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
To some extent, this is a two-part reading, with Ostler preparing me to tackle Pekka Hämäläinen’s new book Indigenous Continent in the coming week or so. But both Ostler and Hämäläinen are inspiring me in wider historiographical terms to rethink the way we narrate a lot of colonial history, much as Richard White’s The Middle Ground did at an earlier time in my career.
Quotes
“I have also tried to show not only that Native people did survive but how they did, or, in other words, to give accounts of what scholars in Indigenous studies are increasingly calling survivance.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Hämäläinen is even more forceful on a point that also emerges in this book, which is that a history that takes the defeat and destruction of Native communities on their own lands as the beginning of American history just completely misses the vastness of time in which Native communities remained the dominant power—or at least one of several—within contested and shifting territories, consigning all of that history to mere prologue. That has the effect of settling the settlers, so to speak: of rendering those previous histories null and void, with no force or relevance to the present save for a kind of mawkish, sentimental regret. To bring Native agency back into focus along with those long histories of unsettlement makes the present newly contingent as well; to recall that defeat and decline were constantly interspersed with resilience and reconfiguration brings new kinds of hope and possibility into view here and now.
I was a bit surprised at the decision to pin this account to the chronology of United States history, given that the frame of “survivance” is so much bigger. I think that gives the book a surprisingly conventional chronological feel, which may be the part of its raison d’etre that ties it to textbooks as a genre. (There’s a second volume coming that covers the post-Civil War period in the American West.) But there’s so much more to say about the period between initial contact and the 18th Century that seems pertinent, despite it being incredibly vast and challenging to cover with the same detail.
There are points where I wanted the account to diverge a bit from an account of what sovereignties and leaders did and meant to do, but I think that’s one place where the question of genocide deforms the conceptual framing somewhat (e.g. genocide is so conceptually tied to modern ideas of international law and national power that trying to ask whether organized violence constitutes genocide already privileges that framing). For me at least an active interest in agency ought to at least try to get the analysis inside of communities and their social networks and hierarchies more persistently than much of this book does. But I suspect that’s also a sign that I come from outside of this historiography, because I can see how much the book speaks back to a conventionalized national history, in some ways parallel to the 1619 Project, and seeks to some extent to work alongside—or in replacement of—that history. I just wanted more on the arts of survivance in everyday life, in its meanings, and perhaps a bit less on leaders and sovereignties.
The really basic thought that Ostler helps me to fully digest is something I’ve read in a few other historical and anthropological works, which is that the idea that disease killed Native Americans with some organized violence by settlers around the edges, usually in that order, needs massive revision at every level, including the common-knowledge version that many contemporary American can readily cite. The reason for revising is first and foremost empirical: that sequential summary gets it wrong in so many cases, where the organized attacks not just on people but on crops and the infrastructure of settlement created the conditions for disease epidemics. To understand first that epidemics were one of the apocalyptic horsemen that followed on violence and war and that second settlers were often quite aware of epidemics as part of a strategy for displacing Native communities. That’s not the same as the arguments over whether smallpox-laden blankets were flung into Native settlements on purpose and so on, but the point is that the settlers were quite aware of an instrumentally useful connection between burning crops, disrupting settlements, forcing flight and mortality in war on one hand and epidemic disease on the other.
The other thing that comes through crystal-clear, comprehensively, is the instrumental clarity overall of various strategies of displacement and dispossession and the extent to which those were part of the way settler communities created and accumulated capital which was frequently reinvested in further dispossession. Even when “respectable elites” professed to be annoyed or horrified by the actions of supposedly autonomous gangs or groups of settlers, Ostler shows that those elites were either part of planning conversations that assumed such actions would happen or exaggerated their own helplessness rather than take any risk of punitive or restrictive action—that presaged the passivity of the melancholy that swept through settler communities only after Native communities in their vicinity had been safely defeated, destroyed or expelled.
The point of the book is also to say that where Native communities survive—many do—and where the heritage of Native communities lives on in the bodies of many people within North America—it’s not because Europeans showed mercy or forbearance but because of successful strategies of survivance—retreat, defense, evasion, insurgency, infiltration. In some ways, this book, like some others I’ve read in recent years, really opens up a way to see American history—all of it—as a post-apocalyptic history in which most of us are the Lord Humungus and his band and Native communities are the beseiged protagonists still trying to make their way through the wasteland to safety.