Allowing for some latitude in using the phrase “early America” in the title of this study, it nevertheless provides a thoroughgoing and finely nuanced depiction of crucial issues between Native Americans and white settlers in an important geographical area during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The basic elements of the general narrative have been known for some time: Native Christians in New England and New Jersey banded together for mutual support and ethnic survival, moving from the seaboard to upstate New York and thence to Wisconsin, some even to Kansas. The lasting value of this work is that it covers all these events in comprehensive detail and painstaking accuracy.

The author has furnished an exhaustive display of commonplace materials, as well as others less well known, in order to let natives themselves address such topics as conversion, native churches, intertribal alliances, migrations, and theological reflections on the whole process. The breadth of his researches and synthetic presentation bids fair to being the definitive work in this field, an accomplishment that will endure for quite some time to come. He has unearthed documents found in more than twenty-seven archives, historical societies, and special collections. The author has also incorporated all relevant publications and doctoral dissertations of the past two decades, thus applying the latest contemporary thinking to past events. These sources disclose generations of people who lived in hope and experienced despair. They afford us greater insight into the ways Indian groups sought strength in mutually held beliefs while enduring persistent greed for land and recurrent racial discrimination. The great conundrum was disparity between reward and punishment in this life and the next. “The question . . . was how to account for whites becoming ‘strong & great’ through their low avarice and Indians degenerating to ‘nothing but a wreck of bones’ despite their Christian efforts” (137). In this context of suffering at the hands of white Christians, we hear generations of native leaders (many of them obscure but deserving recognition) who used both biblical and indigenous references to interpret what was happening around them.

A central theme in this book is the chronicling of relentless encroachment by whites on Indian land. Readers learn in agonizing detail of episodes characterized by betrayal, factionalism, alcohol abuse, peonage, and famine. Despite native attempts to survive as ethnic communities with any real prospect of continuity, we observe a tragic progression of new situations and old problems as they unfold over and over again. Following the repetitious sequence of such events is like watching the predictable results of a multiple chain-reaction car crash. To be sure, some natives saw trouble quite early, warning that “white people, particularly the Americans are in nature treacherous & deceitful, have no true friendship for the Indians–& are not to be depended upon for aid & protection—no sooner have they obtained victory but they turn about, fall upon the Indians” (109). Adding his own voice to this cumulative tragedy, the author‘s accompanying jeremiad is nothing less than a plainspoken indictment of the racial bigotry that allowed settlers and land speculators to take extensive acreage and self-respect away from their fellow Christians.

There is no single, universally applicable definition of the term, “race.” Of course as early as the first explorations whites and Indians recognized cultural differences that separated them, and despite periods of peaceful co-existence, those disparities persisted. Natives might cut their hair, wear trousers, and recite a catechism, but periods of open hostility confirmed the deep belief among whites that Indians were essentially savage and inassimilable. Hence the only safe and advantageous thing to do was to regard hostiles (and peaceable natives too) as barbarians who were incapable of civilized habits. In short, render them landless and politically impotent while gaining financially in the bargain. Conversions to Christianity made little difference in this equation where whiteness meant social superiority and Indianness the opposite. Native converts learned that their faith had weak political value when it came to contesting English designs on their land. After 1839 in Wisconsin even citizenship did little to temper the gloomy prospects of Indian life in white-dominated America. This narrative of native experience from discovery to the present does not extol the triumph of enlightened principles; it is rather a relentless exposé of the hypocrisy of American values. Indian acceptance of white cultural standards, Christianity, and citizenship has been ignored because an essentially racist bias has viewed natives as innately savage and destined to extinction through either assimilation into white society or slow demise on reservations. “This dilemma . . . continues to confront Native peoples in the twenty-first century. Its persistence is testimony that race is one of the most profound legacies of American colonialism” (210).