July/Aug 2001

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Native Americans and the Early Republic, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, University Press of Virginia, 2000, 370 pp.; $49.50, hardcover; $17.50, paper

As the American Revolution wound down, J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur sounded a death knell for more than British colonial rule. Indians, he wrote, appeared to be "a race doomed to recede and disappear before the superior genius of the Europeans."[1] Ever since, most of us in the United States have been inclined to agree. On the face of it, Crevecoeur's prediction has seemed accurate, at least with respect to the course, if not the cause, of Indian history. Our history books and movies have told us that in the hundred years after the Revolution, Indian lands and populations got swallowed up, sometimes in small bits, other times in large chunks. As the nation grew, Natives became increasingly removed, literally and figuratively they were from the centers of American culture. Once out of sight, it was easy to put them out of mind. And that's pretty much where they've remained, even for American historians. Today some of us, depending on where we live, get occasional glimpses of Native Americans and their part in America's past. But the disappearing act that Crevecouer forecast appears to have been realized.

Yet appearances can be deceiving. And in this case, as with Crevecoeur's more famous prophecy of a single American identity arising out of the interplay of multiple religious and ethnic groups, history has proven to be more complex and less certain than the Frenchman anticipated. At least that is the conclusion I have been coming to over the last decade.

It turns out that Crevecoeur was not a very good prophet (in any sense of that word), ...