The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as one of profound cultural difference. This book contains six chapters titled “Land,” “Kings,” “Writing,” “Alliances,” “Gender,” and “Race,” showing that Indians and Europeans held common beliefs about their most fundamental realities. They used history and memory to conceive of land as national territory, constructed governments, kept records of important events, formed international alliances, made gender an important social category, and read meaning into the arms, legs, heart, and min ... More

The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as one of profound cultural difference. This book contains six chapters titled “Land,” “Kings,” “Writing,” “Alliances,” “Gender,” and “Race,” showing that Indians and Europeans held common beliefs about their most fundamental realities. They used history and memory to conceive of land as national territory, constructed governments, kept records of important events, formed international alliances, made gender an important social category, and read meaning into the arms, legs, heart, and mind that made up 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 a distinct 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 American up through the end of the Seven Years War, incidents, letters, and recorded speeches from the Iroquois and Creek Confederacies, the Cherokee Nation, and other Native groups alongside British and French sources are analyzed, paying particular attention to the language used in cross-cultural encounters. 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, it is argued that they abandoned an initial willingness to recognize in each other a common humanity and instead developed new ideas and identities rooted in the conviction that, by custom and perhaps by nature, Native Americans and Europeans were peoples fundamentally at odds.