The Aboriginal and the Alien

...the War for Independence became an incredible drama of larger-than-life heroes, a conflict between good and evil...

...Jennings has given us a new truth about our origins, and our celebration of the Bicentennial will ring hollow unless we reckon with it...

...For example, he writes, "suppose it be asked what modern America would be like if Indians had not been here to receive Europe's vanguard...

...This perspective is very much alive in the topics listed under the heading "American Issues Forum," first propagated by Walter Cron-kite and later slavishly incorporated into the Bicentennial programs of a number of American cities...

...and, in history, truth should be held sacred at whatever cost...

...The trespassers, more sensitive than posterity would be to the reality of this sentiment, invented an ideology to legitimize their venture...

...So, despite the imprimatur of the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Mecca of colonial historians, it will not be universally accepted...

...It is easy to see that the concept of savagistn stems from a rapidly disappearing ethnocentrism, and that the "so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers...

...By the end of the 19th century, however, the nationalist or Whig exegesis was being supplanted by two very different scholarly interpretations...

...The answer will depend, he shows clearly, on how the question is raised...

...It is more than ironic that the major celebration today is Buy-Centennial, a merchandizing storm that has blown up from a tempest in a tea port...

...To my knowledge, though, this is the first account of 17th-century British North America sustained throughout by a notion of cultural interaction...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. IIlick Professor of History, San Francisco State University I have evaluated institutional proposals to celebrate our country's 200th birthday, sat on my city's and my university's committees specially created for the occasion, read the newspaper stories about related upcoming events, and watched them being touted on television...

...whether Indians have made substantial contributions to society...

...Francis Jennings' The Invasion of America allows us to consider both the matter of relativism and the content of our filiopietism in challenging some long held and cherished myths about our origins...

...RatheT, there are striking parallels between the current efforts to honor (or exploit) our revolutionary beginnings and the changing interpretations of those origins over the past two centuries...

...It may seem that only an ostrich could have avoided such a conclusion, and Jennings never pretends he originated the idea...

...The imperial historians, responding to the newly-emergent Anglo-American detente, assigned previously unnoticed virtue to England and accused the colonials of irresponsibility...

...The former group has its contemporary analogue in a facetious Philadelphia enterprise, the Committee for Reunion with England, while the more serious efforts of the New Left to form a People's Bicentennial and a New American Movement echo the refrains of the Progressives...

...As the rational principles of the Enlightenment collapsed from the weight of 19th-century romantic nationalism, Weems' approach to the past predominated...

...The second part of The Cant of Conquest is a narrative of warfare in southern New England during the 17th century and, in my opinion, is notably less interesting than the topically-organized first part...

...The approach provides two angles of vision...

...Still, it is necessary to Jennings' argument, and it surely substantiates the observation of Colonel Thomas Aspinwall that "our forefathers, though wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless in respect to Christian charity, under a cloud...

...Jennings examines both the inspiration and the errors of this ideology—and in so doing unfortunately descends occasionally into sarcasm or stridency...

...For Jennings, now chairman of the history department at Cedar Crest College, utilizes anthropological concepts and research to confront historical tradition and present anew the "development of Amerindian-Euramerican acculturation".— that is, "the history of relationships between Europeans and Indians in what ordinarily is called the colonial period of United States history...

...To support his thesis Jennings examines economic exchange (showing how the fur trade led to Indian dependency yet, surprisingly, has implications for the American economy today), political organization, land holding, and warfare...

...I laughed when told that the citizens of Belmont, California were decorating their fire hydrants to resemble revolutionary heroes, yet these phallic portraits are no sillier than the biographical hyperbole of Parson Weems who, shortly after George Washington's death, gave us the Father of our Country complete with cherry tree legend...

...Nevertheless, he illustrates a truth not forgotten but simply ignored (you will look for it in vain in the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner and the generations of imitators who compose the frontier school of American history): Our society is the product of the interrelationship between two cultures, aboriginal and alien...

...The Progressive historians, sensitive to the reform movement in the early part of this century, emphasized the internal social upheaval brought about by actual revolution...

...He ends the first half of his volume by again raising the question of...

...The viewpoint, it will be recognized, has recently been revived by the televisional minutemen...

...The melange of happenings billed as Bicentennial is staggering, but—the startling discovery of my reflection— cannot be simply charged to the variegated nuttiness of California or the uncouth spewings forth of American popular culture...

...In the 1930s some historians hopped on the New Deal bandwagon, finding economic causes for the American Revolution and villains in the form of protocapitalist colonial merchants...

...But the idea of cultural interchange—because it is sophisticated, many-faceted and rests on the assumption of reciprocity—will be controversial...

...True, this is a revisionist effort reflecting something of the malaise that has followed our Vietnam involvement, and he himself has a record of persecution for his political beliefs...

...The Indians saw the European settlement as an invasion of their society...

...But his study is no mere reaction against real or imagined ills of contemporary American society, however much those maladies may have prompted the investigation...

...The Cold War brought the so-called neo-Whig interpretation to bear, with its focus on the eternal verity of the principles for which war was waged and independence won...