In this remarkable and groundbreaking book, Jace Weaver takes the reader on an impressive one-thousand year tour of Western indigenous history to illustrate the importance and presence of Native peoples in the wider Atlantic basin. Central to Weaver's analysis is a construct he terms the “Red Atlantic.” Freely playing off of Paul Gilroy's 1993 book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Weaver hopes to do for indigenous populations what Gilroy did for Africans. Gilroy rightly corrected the field of Atlantic history that marginalized the presence, importance, and centrality of blacks, but in doing so, Weaver suggests, Gilroy merely perpetuated the marginalization of American Indians. Atlantic studies as a field is still “largely a conversation about blacks and whites,” according to Weaver; indigenous populations still recede into the background, especially after the opening years of colonization and a corresponding demographic collapse (8). The stories The Red Atlantic tells, however, convincingly demonstrate “that from the earliest moments of European/Native contact in the Americas until the first quarter of the twentieth century, Indians, far from being marginal to the Atlantic experience, were, in fact, as central as Africans” (17).

To make his case, Weaver thematically surveys the period from 1000 CE to 1927 CE; that is, from the arrival of the Vikings in North America to the solo flight of Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic. In six readable and conversationally written chapters that cover captives, slaves, and prisoners; soldiers and sailors; statecraft and cosmopolitanism; celebrity Indians; and the literature of the Red Atlantic, Weaver impressively covers a vast stretch of time, space, events, and personas to create the undeniable sense of Native presence, importance, and vitality as they negotiated European imperialism in this long stretch of Western history.

This book performs powerful intellectual, historical, and theoretical work in the fields of American and Native American studies. One of the many benefits to such a long temporal time frame is that it allows the innumerable repetitions of Native history to become more evident. The repeated trips to London especially stand out; when Natives show up in London in the nineteenth century, the reader immediately calls to mind other similar responses in the preceding two hundred years by Native diplomats and leaders who equally marveled at London's magnitude and excesses. Similarly, the repeated theme of European colonial powers using one colonized “other” against another colonized “other” leave a deep impression, as in 1884 when fifty-six Kanawake Mohawks from Canada were sent to Egypt as boatmen on the Nile to help relieve British troops trapped in Khartoum (108).

Another benefit of such a long time frame is the inclusion of a wide cast of Native individuals. Weaver introduces readers to Inuit captives who were taken to Scandinavia c.1420 (with the added benefit of highlighting European–Native relations prior to 1492); Paul Cuffee, the late eighteenth-century merchant and sailor (who is usually thought of as African American, despite his Native mother and wife); the prolific nineteenth-century Cheyenne artist David Pendleton Okenhater, who spent time as a prisoner on the coast of Florida; Bert Holderman, a Cherokee member of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the late nineteenth century; E. Pauline Johnson, the late nineteenth-century popular performer and writer who self-consciously tapped into Indian stereotypes to please her transatlantic audiences, even as her poems delivered stinging critiques of colonialism (such as “The Cattle Thief”); and the eight thousand to twelve thousand American Indian soldiers who fought in World War I.

Throughout, Weaver helpfully relies whenever possible on the writings and oral traditions of Natives and Native communities. Additionally, Weaver insists that to understand the full scope of the Red Atlantic, we need to move beyond the Anglo-speaking Atlantic. He therefore includes Garcilaso de la Vega, the sixteenth-century Inca writer and soldier who spent much of his life in Spain, chronicling the history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas; and Enrique, a sixteenth-century Taino cacique, who, Weaver argues, “inaugurated formal statecraft” within the Red Atlantic (136). Such inclusions, while much needed and welcome, are somewhat lonely islands in an otherwise thoroughly anglicized Red Atlantic found on the pages of this book.

Weaver's volume also forces a new orientation within Native history, namely towards the Atlantic (a trend already taking place in some quarters). It traverses the same temporal ground that is often covered in histories of Natives in the Americas (particularly in North America), but it does so without primary organization around the traditionally deemed “big events,” such as removal, allotment, nineteenth-century Indian wars, and so on. Weaver does not neglect such important topics, but suggests a new way to think about them by expanding well beyond the narrow confines of the American West.

The Red Atlantic is provocative, engaging, and masterfully narrated. And yet, despite the many satisfying strengths of this book, there are some other framings and issues that raise more questions than they answer. Although the chapters overall work well together (despite some unavoidable overlap between Natives as diplomats, celebrity Indians, and writers), the narrative voice of chapter 5 on the literature of the Red Atlantic shifts noticeably and somewhat inexplicably from Native voices and actors to Anglo-European literature about Natives. “The principal literary aspect of the Red Atlantic,” Weaver states, “is how Europeans and, later, Americans came to define themselves in comparison with, and in contrast to, the indigenous peoples of the Americas” (216). There are undoubtedly potential gains from this shift, and although there are other chapters in which Natives appear as authors and writers, one could envision an entirely different chapter that highlights the incredible power of writing in allowing Natives to pursue legal justice, preserve traditions, forge an indigenous Christianity, and build networks and alliances. It is immensely fascinating to peer into the entirely fabricated Indian world of Karl May, the German pseudo-expert on Indian cultures who shaped an entire country's perception of Native America, or to think about how Edgar Allan Poe contributed to this literature through his The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Weaver is entirely right that this Anglo-European self-fashioning came on the backs, and at the expense, of Natives. But in a book that highlights Native negotiations and agency, this is a distinct turn away from Natives as actors and towards indigenous peoples as envisioned, caricatured, and used.

It is also unclear why a book that is arguing so strongly for Native agency and presence in the Atlantic uses events marked by Europeans for its temporal frame of reference. That is to say, in Weaver's narrative, the beginning of the Red Atlantic (with the arrival of the Vikings in 1000 CE), the re-inauguration of the Red Atlantic (the “discovery” of the New World by Columbus in 1492), and the closing of the Red Atlantic (Charles Lindbergh's solo transatlantic flight in 1927) are all enacted by Europeans. After narrating Columbus's arrival in 1492, for example, Weaver notes, “The Red Atlantic had been opened up” (47). But what are the intellectual and interpretive costs of framing the Red Atlantic in such a way that requires the presence of Europeans? In some ways, this merely serves to reinforce an older historical interpretive fallacy, namely that Native history only really began when Europeans showed up (or, to put it differently, Native history only becomes meaningful with the arrival of Europeans).

At a certain level, there is a logic to this Euro-referentialism. The “Atlantic world,” whatever that has come to mean, is first and foremost defined by the intersections of disparate peoples. Nonetheless, it seems like a missed opportunity to push the current boundaries of Atlantic world studies more daringly, or to think even more radically about what a truly Red Atlantic might look like – one that vastly pre-dated European presence, was cocreated by Natives throughout, and continues to be traversed, challenged, and enlarged by indigenous peoples worldwide to this day. In short, wasn't the Atlantic “red” before Europeans ever showed up?

Similarly, it is unclear why Weaver needs the Red Atlantic to “close” at all. In virtually every single one of Weaver's categories, Native peoples continue to play roles beyond 1927 that feel continuous with these past events in significant ways. Weaver is aware of these developments; at multiple places in the book he mentions post-1927 transatlantic activities by Natives and then qualifies them by noting that they happened “after the close of the Red Atlantic” (261). The ongoing international diplomacy of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (one highlight of which was a 1977 delegation to Geneva, Switzerland, to address the United Nations) is just one example of the ways in which Native peoples remained active players long after 1927. Another powerful episode of supposedly “post-Red Atlantic” Native transatlantic diplomacy (not mentioned by Weaver) took place on 22 November 2006, when Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh, Mohegan tribal spiritual leader Bruce “Two Dogs” Bozsum, and other Mohegans in full regalia held a ceremony at Southwark Cathedral in London to commemorate the untimely death of yet another Mohegan diplomat, the eighteenth-century sachem Mahomet II, in 1736. It is curious why these and many other episodes are not deemed to be part of the Red Atlantic.

Indeed, instead of the “Red Atlantic” closing in 1927, one could argue that it merged into a global indigeneity, in which the indigenous peoples of the Lands of the Demographic Takeover (in Alfred Crosby's parlance) – the Americas, New Zealand, and Australia – increased their worldwide mobility, collective consciousness, and political organization to accomplish movements of international significance and resonance, as with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).

The “Red Atlantic” calls to mind another powerful analytic catchphrase in the field of Native history: Richard White's “middle ground.” In both cases, however appealing they might be, these terms also obscure as much as they illuminate. The lived reality of the Atlantic, as Weaver admits in several places, was not red or black or even white, at least not exclusively so. Indeed, it was a frenzied world of coercion, devastation, and (for some) fortune-building that was international, multiethnic, and at least triracial. These disparate and various activities involved the intersections of all of the various players in the Atlantic – red, black, white, and other, as recent volumes of collected essays on the Atlantic demonstrate. The Atlantic was surely not predominately red, but perhaps it takes a book to argue that it was for the field to better narrate the important and ongoing role of Natives in this space across time.

In this way, then, The Red Atlantic is an ambitious, powerful book that serves as a call to scholars to take more seriously Native presence, negotiation, movement, and vibrancy during the long and ongoing span of Euro-American presence in the Americas. If Weaver's Red Atlantic has closed, the conversation sparked by The Red Atlantic is surely just opening.

In 1875, seventy-two Native Americans were imprisoned at Fort Marion in Florida. Survivors of the Red River War, they had been transported hundreds of miles from their homelands and incarcerated on the Atlantic littoral. There, in a seventeenth-century Spanish fort, rechristened for a Revolutionary War hero, the prisoners became the subjects of a civilizing experiment. Their commander, Richard Pratt, determined “to bring the Indians into best understanding and relations with our people,” issued them with military uniforms; instructed them in military drill, art, English and religion; and supported them in small commercial enterprises, selling alligator teeth and chartering boats to local tourists. One of Pratt's “greatest successes” was the Cheyenne “Oakerhater” (Okuh hatuh or Making Medicine), who was ordained an Episcopal deacon in 1881. After helping Pratt to establish the first Indian boarding school, Oakerhater worked as a missionary, preacher, Cheyenne chief and medicine man until his death in 1931 (74–85).

For Jace Weaver, Fort Marion in Florida is “a station on the Red Atlantic” (75), one focal point for a diverse web of experiences and influences which Weaver groups into three key aspects: material, technological, and human physical or intellectual “transportation.” Weaver's work is wide-ranging and, as might be expected of a literary critic with degrees in law and religion writing on a historical topic, strongly interdisciplinary, grappling with “not only … how Natives and non-Natives interacted across the Red Atlantic but also … how they thought about it, conceptualized it and articulated it” (xii–xiii).

Weaver has a good eye for an arresting image, and the book is full of lively portraits of Native American life. Importantly, he makes a plea for the inclusion of “bicultural” people in the Red Atlantic, arguing that they have previously been seen as somehow “diminished in Indianness” (xi). This is an essential corrective to previous studies which have tended to place the “authentic” indigenous experience in opposition to the cosmopolitanism and mestizaje of the Atlantic world, and it results in some extraordinary and important inclusions. For example, Paul Cuffee, the famous “African American” Quaker abolitionist and the richest American man of colour in the late eighteenth century, was actually both son and husband to women of the matrilineal Wampanoag tribe, and very much a forgotten Native figure (87–98).

As a project of recovery, Weaver's work is outstanding. By taking the widest possible definition of the Red Atlantic, he reinstates figures such as Cuffee to their rightful place as part of indigenous history, uncovers forgotten individuals, and provides fresh perspectives on what are often well-known stories. The book undoubtedly sheds light on a sorely neglected aspect of Atlantic history and offers plenty of enjoyable surprises. Weaver rightly dismisses the paternalism which has reduced the comparatively small numbers of indigenous travellers to “precious” curiosities (17) and reasserts their individuality, agency and importance. But in a world where entangled histories have become mainstream, even the most diehard Eurocentrist is hardly going to be surprised by the fact that indigenous people were active and independent agents in the Atlantic world. And, short of pointing out Indians in unusual places, it is not clear what this Red Atlantic offers that other approaches such as ethnohistory, “entangled histories” or the New Indian History do not.

Like much Atlantic history, the framing also seems incongruously Eurocentric at times. The book's narrative starts with Columbus, and the Red Atlantic is “inaugurated” (or “re-inaugurated”) by European debates over the humanity of indigenous captives. For a book which aims to invert our understandings of the Atlantic, recentring the story and undermining established accounts, this is surprisingly well-trodden territory for the “white Atlantic,” as Weaver astutely dubs the traditional Atlantic history of Armitage et al. (4). Weaver, for whom “most periodizations are arbitrary anyway” (xi), sees the Red Atlantic as beginning in 1000 CE with the arrival of the Vikings, and ending with Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, which “changed forever how people interact with the Atlantic Ocean” (16). But these dates not only seem rather arbitrary (particularly given that, as Weaver points out, a regular transatlantic plane service only began in 1939), but also frame the study in terms of American interactions with non-Native peoples, implicitly sidelining indigenous understandings of the Atlantic. Native Americans did not first discover the Atlantic when Europeans arrived, any more than their own story started when they were “discovered” by Columbus. Although their interactions with the Atlantic may have been more localized, Americans were engaged in oceanic activity long before the Viking contacts of the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. The strong seafaring tradition of the ancient Maya has been uncovered by the Proyecto Costa Escondida (Hidden Coast Project), for example; archaeological investigations at the Maya port of Vista Alegre show evidence of intermittent activity as early as 800 BCE.

Aiming to do for Native Americans what Gilroy's famous The Black Atlantic did for Africans, Weaver hopes to correct our perspective, “to restore Indians and Inuit to the Atlantic world and demonstrate their centrality to that world” (x). But while equal in ambition, and far more accessible than Gilroy's densely theorized and jargon-heavy text, The Red Atlantic lacks the precision which marked Gilroy's work. The Black Atlantic was sharply conceptualized and theoretically sophisticated, seeing the Atlantic as a “single, complex unit of analysis” which was capable of producing “an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (15). Weaver's Red Atlantic, on the other hand, is a miscellany of ideas and associations; this has the advantage of linking diverse issues and highlighting many neglected aspects of the Native American experience, but this “shopping basket” approach also makes it difficult to identify the Red Atlantic's distinctive significance.

The Red (or Indigenous) Atlantic can be a powerful tool for reasserting indigenous agency in global history and understanding the unique and cosmopolitan roles played by Native Americans in “the making of the modern world” (to steal Weaver's subtitle). But, for me, the Fort Marion prisoners exemplify the unrealized potential of The Red Atlantic. Weaver crafts a compelling tale, carefully unpicking the complexities of the white–indigenous encounter, but I am not convinced that he is telling an Atlantic story. For Weaver, it is the prisoners’ coincidental proximity to the ocean which draws them into the Red Atlantic, and the ocean impinges on their lives only as background, neither facilitating nor shaping their story in any distinctive way. Survivors of the war for the Great Plains, the Indians confined at Fort Marion may have lived by the ocean, but their story is really one about land. It is a familiar tale of western expansion and frontier conflict, the decimation of natural resources and the “pacification” of the plains, of white settlements and indigenous reservations. The Fort Marion Indians certainly saw the Atlantic – they were imprisoned next to it, fished it, drew it, even sailed on it – but their engagement with the ocean was largely peripheral, its presence coincidental to their story. Here the Atlantic is merely a maritime canvas for a traditional picture of borderland encounter. Weaver's Red Atlantic is a context where things happen, not a concept which shapes what happens; it is a descriptive rather than an interpretive framework.

Nonetheless, The Red Atlantic is an entertaining and interesting read which covers an ambitious range of material, although I would have liked to see Weaver focus more on analysing the “substantial primary research” (xiii) he mentions in the preface. The scope of this book makes the use of other scholars’ research utterly reasonable (Weaver himself admits this is partly “a synthetic work” (xiii)), but I was surprised by the extensive quotation from secondary literature and heavy reliance on the few previous studies of this topic. As a scholar working in this field, I also found it particularly frustrating to encounter the occasional vague footnote. For example, the estimate of 600,000 for the number of indigenous slaves being shipped to Europe (17) is referenced as “based on my reading of the British, French, and Spanish sources, as well as on the secondary texts” (181–82 n. 31). It is reassuring to read that “I have run the estimate by several historians of the field who agree that it is reasonable,” but the lack of any source or secondary references makes it very difficult to verify, develop, or indeed challenge Weaver's conclusions. Similarly, I could not easily trace the source of some very interesting military dispatches of 1886 discussing the possible surrender of the Apache (294 nn. 79, 81, 82, 84).

The Red Atlantic is a landmark study, and it has been a long time in coming. In a field so inclusive and now so mainstream as Atlantic history, it is astonishing that for more than a decade the only well-known “Red Atlantic” was a radical, Marxist ocean, while indigenous histories remained largely terrestrial. I was excited to see the publication of a major work focussing on indigenous Atlantic history; The Red Atlantic opens the door to fresh and exciting conceptual ground, but it does not set out a clear path for others to follow. Weaver has strong claims to be the “father of the Red Atlantic,” but if it is to thrive then this fledgling paradigm will need a more disciplined upbringing. Without a clear sense of what exactly the Red Atlantic is, it has proved hard for Weaver to articulate why it matters. For the Red Atlantic to be a meaningful historical model, it needs to be imagined beyond its literal (or littoral) borders. The Red Atlantic has the potential to transform our understanding of history, but for that to happen it must be a conceptual space, not just a geographical one.

During her early seventeenth-century sojourn in London, Matoaka, better known to history as Pocahontas, watched a performance of The Tempest. These days the play is often interpreted as a parable about England's early forays into colonial settlement, and it is fascinating to speculate how this firsthand witness to English colonialism might have responded to it. Indeed, as Jace Weaver notes in his readable survey of what he calls the Red Atlantic, the play possessed more direct links to Matoaka, as it was partly inspired by the experiences of English settlers, including her husband John Rolfe, following the wreck of their vessel the Sea Venture in Bermuda in 1609. Sadly, we don't have any idea what she made of Shakespeare's masterpiece, but Matoaka was not the only indigenous visitor to London during the early modern era to view such theatrical depictions of colonial expansion: in 1730, a delegation of seven Cherokees were taken to see Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. The group of Iroquois delegates who visited London in 1710, in turn, themselves formed part of the spectacle at the performances of Hamlet and Macbeth they attended, for they were seated on the stage.

The Red Atlantic is replete with both intriguing vignettes such as these, and compelling life stories or forgotten histories, such as that of the group of fifty-six Mohawks from Québec who assisted the British general Lord Wolseley in his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to relieve the siege of Khartoum in 1884–85. The Mohawks’ skill in navigating cataracts was employed to negotiate challenging stretches of the Nile, where they worked alongside Egyptian boatmen. As Weaver reminds us, “their recruitment reflects a consistent pattern of empires employing one colonized Other against another” (108). In contrast to the historical silence surrounding Matoaka's response to The Tempest, however, we possess a firsthand account of the Mohawks’ experiences in Egypt, for their commander Captain Louis Jackson composed a memoir that describes not only the group's response to crocodiles and local people, but also touristic sites such as the pyramids at Giza.

The Red Atlantic amasses many such individual and group histories, starting with the case of the two boys kidnapped in Newfoundland by the Vikings in the eleventh century, to demonstrate the relevance of indigenous people to the concept of Atlantic history. Weaver's thesis is one with which it would be difficult to disagree having read this volume: that Native peoples have crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in many different capacities since the kidnapping of the two unfortunate youths from Newfoundland, and that this indigenous presence must form part of any understanding of the Atlantic world. These assertions are amply demonstrated in the book's six chapters, which provide examples of the many different categories of indigenous Atlantic traveller. Individual chapters examine involuntary travellers (such as the Newfoundland boys) abducted as slaves or captive interpreters, and the many other modalities through which Native peoples engaged with Atlantic space. Weaver argues forcefully that indigenous peoples were a central presence on the ocean as soldiers and sailors – the codfish industry, for example, could not have functioned without them – and he also chronicles the lives of individual diplomats (such as the Cherokee delegation who watched Oroonoko), campaigners, artists, performers and others who likewise traversed Atlantic space. The final chapter reviews some of the ways in which (mostly) nonindigenous writers have represented this Native presence, to suggest that “Europeans and, later, Americans came to define themselves in comparison with, and in contrast to, the indigenous peoples of the Americas” (216). Weaver is generous in acknowledging the ways in which he has built on, or drawn together, the research of other scholars, although he does not hesitate to criticize those researchers who have overlooked, downplayed or dismissed the role of Native peoples in shaping the Atlantic world. Overall, The Red Atlantic does a superlative job of establishing the presence of indigenous people in the Atlantic world, and in this regard certainly merits the comparison Weaver regularly invokes with Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic.

Despite its subtitle, The Red Atlantic is not particularly concerned with the concept of modernity as an analytical tool. The ways in which this indigenous presence shaped the nature of modernity, or indeed what the concept's specific relevance is to his story, is not Weaver's focus. Neither is he particularly concerned to trace in any detail the conclusions we should draw from this history, beyond the compelling insight that a history of the Atlantic world that excludes Native peoples is necessarily incomplete. The book's final pages offer some observations about how European philosophers found the noble savage and other concepts inspired by their contemplation of indigenous society good to think with, but this is not the book's real focus, nor does Weaver delve much into demonstrating that indigenous people formed a foil against which “Europeans and, later, Americans came to define themselves” (274) – a topic that would in any event form the subject of a different, or at least much longer, study. At its heart are the detailed individual stories of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, cataloguer of the British Museum's Arabic manuscripts; Knud Rasmussen, the “Danish Eskimo” (261); Samson Occom, educational fundraiser; and a host of other men, women and children whose lives helped create the Red Atlantic. The book, more than anything else, consists of their stories. Weaver's commitment to narrative, to telling stories, is beautifully captured in his final sentence, in which he considers the case of several Australian Aborigine boys brought to Italy, only to conclude, “but that is a tale of different oceans and an indigenous story for another day” (278, my emphasis).

In this wide-ranging monograph, Jace Weaver attempts to theorize the existence of a “Red Atlantic” to parallel Paul Gilroy's “Black Atlantic” and also what Weaver, like many scholars, views as the in-all-but-name “white Atlantic” whose study, pioneered by, amongst others, Bernard Bailyn, was heavily influenced by the post-World War II context of the formation of NATO and the rise of the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain. In so doing, Weaver examines the experiences of indigenous Americans which range geographically from the Inuit of the Arctic to the Taino of the Caribbean, and temporally from the earliest legends of Viking contact to Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, which Weaver sees as the real “closing of the frontier” in relation to the Atlantic world. Weaver's stated goal is “to restore Indians and Inuit to the Atlantic world and demonstrate their centrality to that world,” which he considers to be “equally important to, if not more important than, the Africans of Gilroy's black Atlantic” (x–xi). This is a bold undertaking, and it is perhaps unsurprising that The Red Atlantic ends up being equally notable for the breadth of its vision and for the limitations thereof.

In company with previous generations of Atlantic historians, Weaver emphasizes that the Atlantic, as a physical space, was at least as much a bridge or a highway as it was a barrier to the transit of people, goods, and ideas, and, following Gilroy's lead, he stresses that these movements across the ocean were far from unidirectional; like Americans of African descent, indigenous Americans possessed “radical mobility” (8) which not only transported them, voluntarily or by force, to the “Old World,” but which also had powerful effects – economic, political, cultural, and social – on European society. Weaver suggests that even those Native Americans who never left their birthplaces were participants in this “Red Atlantic,” as the goods they created, the texts they produced, and the technological and linguistic innovations they introduced into European practices were equally significant, but his study nonetheless “focuses foremost on the physical movement of indigenes themselves across and around the Atlantic basin” (31), centring the chapters that follow on a series of specific categories of indigenous transatlantic travellers.

Weaver turns his attention first to those American indigenes whose oceanic crossings were involuntary, as captives, slaves, and prisoners. Whether or not one accepts the literary evidence from the Norse sagas of Greenland that the first Native Americans were brought to Europe c. AD 1000, it is certain that captive Inuit had arrived in Scandinavia by 1420, supporting Weaver's contention that the Columbian voyages did not inaugurate but rather “re-established the Red Atlantic, first commenced far to the North by the Vikings’ arrival” (42). Although Isabella of Spain expressed her opposition to the enslavement of indigenous Americans, the practice took firm root within a few decades of Columbus's initial landfall. While the great majority of enslaved indigenes laboured in or near their places of birth in the Americas, others were dispersed all around the Atlantic world: Weaver's vivid anecdotes depict a Cayuga chief serving as a galley slave in France, survivors of the Pequot War and King Philip's War being sold into bondage on Caribbean sugar plantations, and even Charles Darwin's ship of exploration, the Beagle, including among its passengers several youths expropriated from their home in Tierra del Fuego. But Weaver notes that, even in the Indian slave trade, “one should not think that Natives were totally without agency” (65); the Cayuga galley slave Ourehouare later became a diplomatic envoy between his community and the French imperial authorities, while the Patuxet Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, made half a dozen transatlantic voyages in his role as a translator and mediator between New England indigenes and English colonizers, and in the process thereof transmuted into “the premier Red Atlantic cosmopolitan” (59).

Weaver's subsequent chapters follow a similar model, taking a roughly chronological but geographically wide-ranging approach to participants of various types in the crossing of the “Red Atlantic.” In the chapter on soldiers and sailors, he reclaims the mariner Paul Cuffee, best known for his involvement in endeavours to create settlements for free people of colour in Sierra Leone, as a crucial figure in Native American history, pointing out that Cuffee's mother and wife were Wampanoag, and as theirs was a matrilineal culture both Cuffee and his children were likely to have possessed a strong sense of Indian identity and culture. Throughout this chapter, Weaver rightly stresses the less than widely known fact that indigenous Americans have had a centuries-long tradition of fighting not only against Europeans and white Americans, but also with them, participating as allies or as pawns in intra-European wars, such as the Seven Years War, in the pre-Revolutionary era, and then volunteering in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population for US and Canadian military service, often overseas. In perhaps the most unexpected juxtaposition of colonized cultures, in 1885 a unit of fifty-six Canadian Mohawks found themselves engaged in the British Army's attempts to relieve General Charles Gordon, governor general of the Sudan, whose forces were in combat against Muslim insurgents at Khartoum. On a similarly anomalous note, Theodore Roosevelt's “Rough Riders,” now seen as the harbingers of US imperialism, included a number of indigenous Americans, whom Roosevelt claimed “lived on terms of complete equality” (123) with their white comrades.

Weaver moves on to look at the experiences of Native American diplomats, noting that Indians “were engaged in diplomacy from the moment of first Contact” (136), when in 1553 the Taino cacique Enrique negotiated a treaty with Spanish imperial administrators. While some of the material in this chapter – such as that on Manteo and Wanchese, the “Four Indian Kings,” and the 1730 Cherokee delegation, all of whose visits to England have been extensively studied by previous scholars – may be overly familiar to some readers, Weaver's discussion of the career of Levi General, more widely known as Deskaheh, a Cayuga leader who in the 1920s attempted to preserve the sovereignty of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy against the Canadian state by bringing his people's case to the League of Nations in Geneva, adds a fascinating dimension to the historiography of World War I and the diplomatic negotiations which followed it. But Weaver's final two chapters are significantly less successful than those which precede them. While many Europeans, like North Americans, were fascinated by the stream of Indian “celebrities” who performed before them, most famously via “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s long-running and globally travelled Wild West Show, it seems awkward to collapse the distinction between those indigenes who considered themselves professional performers and those, such as the eighteenth-century Mohegan missionary Samson Occom, whose transatlantic fame accrued as a side effect of his religious and educational activities. Individual indigenous women make a rare appearance in the text in this chapter, in the figure of the turn-of-the-century Mohawk poet Emily Pauline Johnson, but Weaver offers no reflections on the extent to which experiences of the “Red Atlantic” might have had a gendered component. The final chapter moves from an examination of individuals to that of texts, but this is by far Weaver's least successful section, as the works included – such as Michael de Carvajal's Complaint of the Indians in the Court of Death (1557), Voltaire's Candide (1759), Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (1798), and Karl May's late nineteenth-century series of “Wild West” stories about “Old Shatterhand” – are not placed in effective dialogue with one another, and neither amplify themes previously discussed in the monograph nor lead it towards an insightful and synthetic conclusion.

As has been indicated by this summary, The Red Atlantic is an extremely wide-ranging study, one which is laudably ambitious in its efforts to place indigenous Americans at the centre, rather than at the margins or in the shadows, of the history of the Atlantic world, and to portray them as agents, rather than exclusively as victims, of the changes engendered by the advent of Euro-American colonialism. And while previous scholars have explored the experiences of and reactions to particular Native American individuals or groups – from Pocahontas to members of Buffalo Bill's troupe – who travelled to Europe, this study is very useful in providing a wider perspective on the many and varied circumstances in which American indigenes chose or were compelled to visit the “Old World.” But the breadth of Weaver's vision creates a series of related problems throughout the text. While each chapter includes at least some fresh and interesting material, much of which could be used as innovative case studies by those teaching Native American, US, or Atlantic history, in many instances each section is presented in isolation from the others within the chapter, without sufficient signposting from one section or chapter to the next. More problematically, Weaver could have done far more to locate each of his subjects within their time, place, and indigenous ethnic culture; to restore agency to Native Americans by conflating the experiences of sixteenth-century Aztecs and twentieth-century Mohawks is as problematic as previous scholars’ failure to place individual histories of Native Americans into a broader structure of meaning.

Many of these difficulties may lie with the rather limited scope of Weaver's reading of secondary sources. While Gilroy's monograph was and is a crucial intervention in the history and culture of the African diaspora, to state that “all this [Atlantic history] had changed – and changed radically” (5) with the publication of The Black Atlantic in 1993 ignores the widely known and immensely influential earlier work of, amongst others, Sidney Mintz, Richard Price, and John Thornton on the creation of Afro-Atlantic culture. Similarly, Weaver's analysis of the early Spanish encounters with the indigenes of the Caribbean and Mexico would have gained greater nuance from engaging with the work of Tzvetan Todorov and Stephen Greenblatt, and his discussion of Native Americans as sailors and soldiers would have benefited from comparing their experiences with those of men of African descent in similar settings, as limned by Jeffrey Bolster, Marcus Rediker and Stewart King. On diplomacy, Weaver might have made use of relevant works by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Joyce Chaplin, and Camilla Townsend, and his postulation that “modern Europe and Western civilization … were forged in the encounter with those indigenes” (xii) would have gained strength by reference to recent studies by Susan Amussen, Catherine Molineux, and James Sweet, which offer insightful accounts of how the encounter with slaves and slavery reshaped not only the economic but also the cultural and religious practices of the New World.

But despite these various caveats, The Red Atlantic is an important and valuable book with which all scholars of Native America and many of the United States need to engage. Although its immense temporal and geographic sweep in some instances compromises Weaver's insights into particular individuals or situations, this broad perspective simultaneously offers his readers the opportunity to see the Atlantic world in a way which privileges the in some cases long-obscured contributions of American indigenes, and to overcome what critics of the Atlantic approach see as artificial and sometimes ahistorical boundaries of empire and nation. The Red Atlantic should not be considered the final word on the subject of indigenous American experience of and participation in the Atlantic world, but it represents an excellent starting point for future explorations thereof.

Since my monograph The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 was published in the spring of 2014, I have been both flattered and humbled by the response to it. It has been by far my most vigorously and widely reviewed book. It has been reviewed in multiple venues in Canada and Great Britain, as well as in many journals in the United States. The overwhelming majority of these reviews have been laudatory. In addition, scholars from Canada, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland have reached out to me. I was contacted by a representative of the family of Paul Teenah, one of the figures I profile. I was able to give them a copy of the photograph I describe (which they did not have) and, from my research, provide them with the exact location of the tombstone bearing his name and dates at Fort Bayard in New Mexico.

As far as I am concerned, this roundtable in the Journal of American Studies is a culmination of sorts. I want to thank the editors of the journal for commissioning it and for the opportunity to offer my further thoughts. And I want to thank the four scholars who participated for their thoughtful reactions and their generous readings. Since I wrote the original journal article on the topic and organized a conference on the subject here at the University of Georgia in 2010 (and the appearance of the article in American Indian Quarterly), all I have wanted to do is provoke a conversation. This roundtable and the other responses suggest that I have succeeded, though it remains to be seen how prolonged the discussion will be. I am especially looking forward to historian Coll Thrush's Indigenous London when it appears from Yale University Press.

As will become manifest, I agree with most of the trade-offs and shortcomings that have been pointed out in reviews and in this roundtable. I was aware of many of them when I finished the manuscript. Further, none of the criticisms surprise me. One prominent historian of Native America (please forgive me for being a bit coy and not identifying him) with whom I shared the manuscript basically told me, “What I find delightfully interdisciplinary some others may find breezy and underdeveloped.”

It was my desire (and that of my publisher) that The Red Atlantic be something of a crossover book. For that reason, it is more synthetic than some might have desired. It strikes me that any history of longue durée must be so, and I cover almost a millennium (though obviously the five hundred years since the Columbus event are the central focus). As an undergraduate in Paris, I was a student of the great French diplomatic historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, whose last book was a Plato-to-NATO history of Europe (I also think of Jacques Barzun's last work, From Dawn to Decadence (2000)). For the same reason of seeking a wider readership, I decided to make the book character-driven, revolving around profiles of particular figures. Finally, what Linford Fisher describes as my conversational style is, I hope, a hallmark of all my work. As I have written previously, I think that we as scholars have an obligation to make our scholarship readable and accessible. I am probably reacting viscerally to too much legal and historical writing that is opaque, obscurantist, and jargon-laden.

Those immersed in Atlantic world history will discover much there with which they are already familiar, certainly. As Drs. Pennock and Fisher point out, however, there are a couple of strategic correctives at work in my book. One is the recentering of Atlantic world history on indigenes, who have been marginalized, and demonstrating their centrality to that world. The other is recovery of “bicultural” persons as indigenous. This retrieval, especially for Native American and indigenous studies, includes, as the roundtable participants point out, individuals like the two Paul Cuffees, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Knud Rasmussen.

I also appreciate those who point out my discussion of the Mohawks who participated in the expedition to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum, a history that I have written about before. When I spoke to people from Kanawake about Louis Jackson's brief book, they knew the story but had never seen the book. I was able to send them a copy. Jackson's book in the Kanawake archive is the one I provided.

Dr. Pennock questions my inclusion of the Atlantic littoral and Fort Marion in the story of the Red Atlantic. She is not alone, though I particularly like her recapitulation of the story. The Zotom drawing showing these displaced persons in an alien world, on the fort parapet, gazing out at the Atlantic haunts me. Their interaction with the Atlantic, sailing to barrier islands, chartering boats, marveling at “water buffalos” (sharks), and so on is, I will admit, minor. Far more important than these few Red River prisoners is the complete removal of the Apache from Arizona to Fort Marion for a much longer stretch. It also sets the stage for the story of Paul Teenah. As far as I know, I am the only person to write about Teenah as a person, albeit tentatively.

The issue of gender is a serious one, and it is a great failing of The Red Atlantic. Dr. Zacek says that a woman makes a rare appearance in the person of E. Pauline Johnson. Dr. Earle begins with my portrait of Matoaka (better known to us as Pocahontas). I discuss the participation of Senauki, Tomochichi's wife, in his delegation to London, but she remains a cipher. Beyond these few, there is only the spare mention of the women who serve primarily as nurses and entertainers during the Spanish–American and Great Wars (and the roles of Enriquillo's spouse and Fuegia Basket as victims). Tsianina Redfeather could have been profitably made into a character. Molly Spotted Elk's activities in Europe postdate the closure of my Red Atlantic (the periodization of which I will return to). It is a frankly poor representation. I hope that someone will pick up the torch and do a proper and fitting study of the Red Atlantic as a gendered space and the role of women in it.

Dr. Pennock questions my figure of 600,000 western hemispheric indigenes (enslaved and transported as captives) as seeing some form of blue-water transport. I am honestly surprised that she is the first reviewer to raise this issue. The estimates of indigenous persons enslaved during the colonial period range from two million to four million. As I and the roundtable participants observe, most of these were worked to death in situ in the mines and encomiendas of Latin America. Alan Gallay states that 51,000 enslaved Indians were shipped out of Charleston alone. Brett Rushforth talks of the thousands of Natives enslaved in New France in his book Bonds of Alliance. As I say, in my reading of the records in the Spanish and French archives, in addition to secondary sources, one does not need many shipments of five hundred and a thousand (coupled with the need to repopulate a Caribbean swept clean by virgin soil plagues and Spaniard brutality and the double exile of five thousand Garifunas) to get to a figure of 600,000. Rushforth believes my estimate to be conservative. While I say that this is dwarfed by the horrific numbers of the Middle Passage, to put the 600,000 in further context, the number of enslaved Africans who came to what is today the United States (as opposed to the Caribbean or Latin America) is estimated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to be only around 390,000. Other estimates run as high as 550,000.

The discussion of my text as Eurocentric and anglocentric is, like my neglect of women, serious and, at least in part, valid. The Red Atlantic, like the black Atlantic and the Atlantic world in general, was the result of European contact with the Americas. Most often this is inaugurated with the Columbus event, though in the case of western hemispheric indigenes, I push this back to the first verified contact around the year 1000 CE. All of my profiles are of indigenous persons. Have I in every instance spoken to how those individuals were shaped – or in some cases broken – by the experience with the Red Atlantic? I have not, though I have – in cases like Matoaka, Attakullakulla, Oconostota, and Louis Jackson and his Kanawake “boys,” among others – tried to. This is a criticism raised, in particular, in a review by Daniel Richter in the Journal of American History, for whose work I have great respect. Rebecca Earle states that I do not really use modernity as an analytic tool. Yet my point (hardly unique to me) is that modernity itself was born out of the encounter between a resource-depleted Europe and the indigenes of the Americas. I therefore appreciate Natalie Zacek's reading, in which she says,

The Red Atlantic is as much about what the encounter did to Europeans as about what it did to American indigenes.

Because of this, I am especially disappointed that Dr. Zacek finds the chapter on literature among my least successful. Linford Fisher also calls the shift to non-Native voices “somewhat inexplicable.” I hear this and take it to heart. My point was to demonstrate just how deeply Europeans and Euro-Americans internalized the events of the Red Atlantic and conceptualized themselves in contradistinction to the indigenous peoples encountered, just as Poe's Tsalalians are coded not only as blacks (embodying southern fears of revolts by enslaved Africans) but as indigenes. I am the first to admit, however, as I have said in print before, that “representation” work (i.e. how indigenous peoples are depicted by non-Natives), as important as it may be, is not about those actual indigenes but about white people.

Regarding the anglocentrism of my text, I worry that I am perpetuating inadvertently a problem that has long plagued Atlantic world history. Though I include Enriquillo, Garcilaso, and, in passing, a few others, in addition to some discussion of France and other metropoles, I recognize the legitimacy of Fisher denominating them “lonely islands” amid a sea of the Anglo world. The Hispano-American and the Luso-American (as well as other colonial) encounters have been long neglected. I hope others will more directly take up the challenge.

Regarding the question of my periodization, as I acknowledge, any time limits are arbitrary. As I said, I push the starting date of the Red Atlantic back almost five hundred years, and my end date approaches Kate Flint's 1930 date in The Transatlantic Indian (2009). I wanted to include Deskaheh and Knud Rasmussen, in addition to the thousands of Native American and First Nations soldiers who volunteered for the Great War (and no one would argue that they were not changed by the experience). I am intrigued by Lin Fisher's query of why it must close at all. And I do mention the 1977 Haudenosaunee delegation to Geneva and the unsung role of Thom Fassett in bringing the Elian Gonzalez episode to a close.

In conclusion, let me recapitulate my gratitude to JAS and to these estimable scholars for their engagement. The only bad response to an author's work is no response. I am truly humbled that they employ adjectives like “landmark” and “groundbreaking.” I trust I have contributed to restoring American indigenes to the Atlantic world. As they point out, I never intended The Red Atlantic to be the last word but rather a starting point. I hope the discussion continues and deepens.