My University of New Mexico course “Celtic and Native American History since 1700” attracts an unusual variety of students. On the first day, when I ask why they chose the course, most reply: “I have Celtic (Irish, Scottish, or Welsh) ancestry”; “I am Native American”; or “I have both Celtic and Native American roots.” Some admit: “I never knew there were any connections between these peoples.”

In his study, White People, Indians, and Highlanders, Colin G. Calloway has tackled the nature of these connections. Even though he narrows the scope by limiting the variety of Celtic people to the Highland Scots and focusing largely on the colonial era, he successfully addresses some of the perplexing issues that have puzzled my students who, despite their immersion in the Southwest's multiethnic environment, have difficulty connecting Indians with Gaels, Irish, and Welsh.

Calloway hangs his argument on several themes. Employing the concepts of colonialism, exodus or removal, economic opportunity, and identity issues, he argues that Highlanders and Indians shared a commonality that lay in “their historical experiences as tribal peoples living on the edges of an empire and confronting historical currents at work on both sides of the Atlantic” (10). Further, he rightly contends that they had extensive dealings with each other in North America. Calloway's decision to confront this theme reflects the universal impulse for authors to engage a subject related to their own lives. Born in Yorkshire, Calloway, he teaches at Dartmouth College and has written widely on American Indian history, especially during the colonial era; further, he traces his maternal ancestry to Highland Scotland, where his mother was raised in Perthshire. Hence, he brings both an academic and a personal commitment to a topic that has long challenged him.

Structuring a book of this nature likely proved an organizational nightmare. A history dealing with such a diverse people, including their colonial and early nineteenth-century encounters, is potentially fraught with internal dilemmas. As Calloway reminds us, he includes all of native North America, while he restricts Scotland to Gaels of the Highlands and Islands. In reality, a good portion of North America is not involved in the story, which enables him to concentrate largely on the regions subject to the British Empire and its old enemy, France, but the chapter on warfare is more broadly conceived, and when he addresses the fur trade, the subject engulfs much of the continent.

When Calloway turns to the fur trade north of the Great Lakes, he engages his readers in the high drama of those Highlanders—at first men from the Orkneys, then others from the Highlands and Hebrides—who dominated the beaver trade, initially within the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC, founded in 1670) and later, in the Montreal-based North West Company that merged with the HBC in 1821. Here Calloway paints on a vast canvas, stretching from the bay named after Henry Hudson to the Fraser River and the future Vancouver, a site reached in 1793 through an incredible journey led by Alexander Mackenzie, who hailed from the Isle of Lewis, where the port town of Stornoway has mounted a plaque to his memory. And here he also spins the intriguing story of Indian-Highlander relations that led to the rise of an entire population of Scots Indians or métis who traced their paternal ancestry not to the French voyageurs but to the fur traders from the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

When he shifts to the fur trade south of the Ohio River, Calloway retains a broad canvas to describe the region encompassed by the deerhide trade, the driving colonial economic institution for Indians of the South, especially Cherokee and Creek (Muskogee), and likewise for those who immigrated from Britain, many of whom came from the Highlands of Scotland. Relations between Highlanders and these Southeastern peoples bore similarities to their counterparts north of the Great Lakes. Unlike the expansive beaver trade, which stretched to the Pacific, the deerhide trade stopped at the Mississippi River, excluding most Highland-Indian relations in the central Plains and Southwest. Across the South, the children of the Highland traders who married into Cherokee and Creek clans emerged as influential cultural brokers, reflected in prominent figures like Alexander McGillivray, post-Revolution Creek chief, and John Ross, nineteenth-century Cherokee chief. These intermediaries often married other mixed-bloods, bore Highland surnames, and educated their children in European fashion, according to their fathers’ custom, but they retained tribal membership through maternal clan lines and remained leaders of their mother's people. They epitomized the thrust of Calloway's story: a people who blended their Gaelic-Indian roots.

Since the bulk of this study focuses on Highland-Indian commonalities and encounters before the nineteenth century, its final section receives less detailed attention. Calloway includes a tightly woven chapter comparing the Highland Clearances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when profit-minded landlords flooded the Highlands with sheep and forced the people from their homes, with the removal of eastern Indians to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River during the 1830s. In each case, he selects the single event that has endured as a symbol for the horror—in the Highlands he looks at the widely known Sutherland Clearances and the role of the infamous Patrick Sellers; in Indian Country, he focuses on the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee name for their forced removal of 1838–39.

In the final chapters Calloway's tone darkens, as he emphasizes the fractures within Highland and Indian cultures spawned through the Clearances and Indian Removal and addresses issues that divided Gaelic Scots from Indians. He points out that Highland settlers who moved onto Indian lands did so with the same destructive force that had led to their departure from Scotland; he also stresses that these Scots attained “membership in the white race,” an altered status that further alienated them from Indians (234). On a final reflective note, he tackles the nineteenth-century romanticizing of Highlanders and Indians—Sir Walter Scott versus Fenimore Cooper—and its dramatic reappearance beginning in the 1960s, suggesting that, criticism notwithstanding, powwows and Highland games “are a marker of identity, an expression of group solidarity, and a celebration, despite all the odds, of cultural survival” (268).

By bringing his story forward to this postcolonial era, Calloway reminds us how much the past remains within the present; hence the identities claimed by Scots, Indians, and Indian Scots today have been forged by their colonial experiences, their uprooting, and their many encounters with each other from the seventeenth century forward.