This is the sort of book that today gets dubbed “white man's history.” But in the polarized world of Native American Indian studies perhaps any book that attempts, as this one does, to “explore what was happening on the ground and treat both European and Indian communities with equal ethnographic justice and exhaustive research” (6) is likely to suffer that sort of attack. Why? One reason is because “ethnographic justice” is something of a contradiction in terms. No one can fault the author's attention to the nuances within the list of American archives he has quarried, but not even he can unearth what is not there. To get closer to justice, this book would have needed to pay much more attention to that Indian archival silence and to the problems inherent in trying to piece together intercultural everyday life in the past from what are prejudicially, and predominantly, non-Indian sources. Keen to stress Indians' similarities with those encroaching upon their lands, the author states, “Simply put, Indians were settlers too: many of the Indians whom colonists encountered were themselves new settlers seeking security in the land” (6). This, like much that misleads, does so by avoiding the wider context. Indian peoples may well have changed their living positions in the eighteenth century in Iroquoia but it is hard to see how this can be divorced from the wider context of colonialism, disease and acute competition for resources within the Northeast. The truth, simply put, is that the Indian and European experiences of settlement were profoundly – and, most importantly, politically – different. Not all settlement, or for that matter resettlement, is the same.

This book extends Richard White's 1991 work The Middle Ground and as such sets itself the task of demolishing something of a straw man by suggesting that scholars in the field have hitherto been unaware of pockets of Iroquois population expansion or of periods of positive Indian–European coexistence and cooperation. Overall, the book's emphasis upon newly discovered incidences of acute interracial violence, including sexual violence, serves to undercut its main thesis concerning the prevalence of interracial harmony. Yet this book has undoubted value. It provides useful new thinking on the English/Irish official William Johnson; highlights the significance of squatters and of the English military in encroaching upon Iroquois lands; links violence, aggression and tragedy usefully to cultural incomprehension in particular of Indian kinship and reciprocity; and, most importantly, reveals how unique colonial New York was during the Seven Years War when Palatine and Oneida communities showed a particular harmony and affinity. This book shows that colonialism is a process – ragged, piecemeal and sometimes ambivalent – a long story of displacement played out over generations not just by immediate foes but by sometime allies and friends. It powerfully personalizes conflict and through its attention to detail makes an important case for how fundamentally Indians and non-Indians adapted to each other in the Northeast.

As a codicil, it is worth noting that this book takes an especially rosy view of the Iroquois experience of conversion and Christianity, highlighting the piety of the Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and the devotion of Christian Iroquois at places like La Prairie whilst making almost no reference to the power of indigenous non-Christian belief or to the necessary complexities of Indian syncretism. As with some of the selective truths and particular emphases within the book overall, the reader is advised to tread warily and to read widely before making a final judgement.