New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America

On the whole, New Worlds for All describes new worlds that Europeans and Indigenous Americans built together. These early chapters, however, highlight both creative and destructive forces, with the latter predominating.

Dramatic alterations to North America’s physical environment produced ripple effects that changed thousands of lives. Calloway mentions the Carolina deerskin trade. Like buffalo on the 19th-century plains, southeastern deer helped sustain Indigenous communities. The decline of the deer population forced some tribes out of the region altogether. The broader impact of the deerskin trade, however, ran deeper than depopulation and dislocation. In exchange for deerskins, Europeans traded guns and alcohol, two things many Indigenous Americans wanted. As Indigenous hunters grew more dependent on European trade, and as the deer population declined, Europeans began to demand slaves. Indigenous hunters made war on rival tribes and took prisoners to sell for European enslavement. Europeans shipped captives to the Caribbean in exchange for enslaved Africans. In a very real sense, the demise of the southeastern deer population accelerated the transition to dependency on the labor of enslaved Africans in the region.

Europeans did not set out to destroy animal populations, but they did aim to take possession of the land. Private land ownership greatly impacted Indigenous America. Indigenous Americans believed that land could be occupied but not owned as an exclusive right. When they made treaties, Indigenous Americans often assumed that they were agreeing to allow free use of land, not that they were relinquishing it altogether. In time, they learned how Europeans interpreted those treaties, but they never entirely conceded to the European notion of private land ownership. In the early 19th century, for instance, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh organized a Native confederacy to resist U.S. expansion on the principle that no tribe had the authority to sell land. The War of 1812 shattered Tecumseh’s confederacy and broke Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi River.

Notwithstanding the destruction and anger wrought by Europeans’ physical transformation of North America—to say nothing of deadly diseases—Calloway highlights more creative exchanges. Material goods tell stories about the way people lived. This is seen in the interaction of Indigenous and European cultures. In the 1980s, for instance, archaeologists in Georgia unearthed an Indigenous child’s grave and discovered a copper gorget (a piece of armor to protect the throat) originally made by the Aztecs, either as a religious ornament or to hold a Bible. Calloway quotes archaeologist James B. Langford, Jr.:

The history of the artifact parallels the history of the era: manufactured by a native of Mexico, influenced by the Christian religion of Europe, carried hundreds of miles to an unsettled frontier, traded for food or given as a gift, adapted for use by another culture, and finally buried with a child in a village soon thereafter abandoned. (45).

With this insight, Calloway addresses the notion that contemporaneous cultures were discreet from one another. Instead, Calloway portrays complex relations between multiple cultures, and illustrates how expanding global trade brought these cultures into closer exchange both economically and ideologically. The scope of influence is culturally plural and multi-directional, rather than linear, i.e. simply European to Indigenous or vice versa.