The Search for a Modus Vivendi between Amerindians and Euro-North Americans

R. David Edmunds. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.260 + xii pp. R. David Edmunds. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little Brown, 1984. 246 + viii pp. Isabel Thompson Kelsay. Joseph Brant 1743-1807, Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984.775 + xii pp. L.G. Moses. The Indian Man. A Biography of James Mooney. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, 293 + xvii pp. Raymond Wilson. Ohiyesa: Charles Eastman, Santee Sioux. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. 219 + xii pp. The underlying "reality" of the confrontation between the civilization of the Americas and that of Western Europe is not easy to identify. The confrontation itself was diffused through time and space, occurring during the course of at least a millennium between countless individuals and myriads of places scattered throughout the Western Hemisphere. Each incident was as individual as the geography, circumstances and persons involved combined to make it. Yet considered together and in context, these separate incidents coalesce to form larger interlocking patterns, which in turn recombine into still larger patterns, until the characters of the civilizations themselves appear. In the final analysis, while each encounter was between individuals, it was the two civilizations they represented which largely determined the course of events. This phenomenon is illustrated, in encapsulated form, in the biographies being considered here. All five subjects, four from Amerindian stock and one the son of Irish immigrants, are well known to ethnohistorians, and came from regions which today are included in the United States. They lived out their days within a two-hundred-year span, from the 1740s until the 1940s, a period which saw the submergence of Amerindian societies, sometimes begun by conquest, but always completed by the flood of European immigration. Each of the five men was concerned, albeit in a different way, with the consequences of the European takeover of the Americas. For them, identifying common ground between their different societies proved to be difficult enough; strategies utilizing those commonalities to arrive at a reasonably satisfactory modus vivendi were positively elusive

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• A Complicated Triangle

  Christopher A Sims•Canadian Review of American Studies•1988

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