|
|
|
Reviews of Books
|
War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British
Empire. By
GREGORY EVANS DOWD
. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Pp. xviii, 360. $32.00.)
Reviewed by Eric
Hinderaker
, University of Utah
|
|
Pontiac is an enigma who has long
attracted the interest of scholars. As Gregory Evans Dowd notes
in War under Heaven, "historians have described many Pontiacs"
(p. 5). For Francis Parkman, who wrote the first book-length treatment
of the uprisings, he was a strong leader who orchestrated a massive
conspiracy against British power. Others, including Howard H. Peckham
and Francis Jennings, have ascribed less impor tance to Pontiac
himself even as they have elevated the significance of the rebellions
that bear his name. In his superb new book, Dowd has restored Pontiac
as a pre-eminent figure in the uprisings while recasting his leadership
qualities in Ottawa terms. Pontiac was not a powerful chief who
became a valiant war leader in the face of insurmountable odds—a
kind of Native American William Wallace—but an ogema
(civil leader) and also possibly a shaman whose leadership model
was Nanabush, the mythic trickster who played a central role in
Ottawa cosmology. Nanabush was a clever, flawed, and—though
he took many forms, most commonly a hare—intensely human character
identified with stories of transformation and survival in the midst
of chaos. Pontiac, like many who followed his lead during the spring
and summer of 1763, found meaning and purpose in the possibility
of dramatic, transformative change in the face of catastrophic loss.
|
1
|
|
Yet this book is much more than a
biography or a narrative of events surrounding the 1763 uprisings.
It is a thoughtful, balanced, judicious response to a generation
of rich scholarship in Native American history and imperial-Indian
relations. Dowd's portrait of British policy is cast in dark hues.
Despite the "sense in much of the literature" that "the period saw
an increasingly accommodating, though unsuccessful, attempt by the
imperial administration to restrain the land-hungry settlers," he
writes, "Pontiac's War first broke out in regions where land was
not an immediate issue and where British and colonial officials,
far more than frontier folk, brought it on. During the war, moreover,
these officers urged, ordered, and approved the indiscriminate slaughter
of Indians" (p. 175). Like James Merrell's Into the American
Woods, Dowd's book explores a context in which other scholars
have found evidence for the possibility of cooperation between British
and Indian polities and discovers instead a largely unambiguous
record of hostility and failure. Dowd does not make such claims
lightly; his examination of the evidence is thorough and balanced,
and the result is one of the most effective analyses we have of
the ways in which Britons imagined the place of Indians in their
empire following the Seven Years' War.
|
. . . |
There are about 1124 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
