The Invasion of America

"Again I think titles are important. I actually teach a course here at Dartmouth called “The Invasion of America”. It’s one of those titles that makes people stop and think: “Invasion of America, when did that happen?” Francis Jennings was hard hitting. Some people would say this book is polemical. He exposes the mythologies of early contact. He focuses on New England because it is the locus of myths about American Indians and early contacts. Instead of dwelling on Thanksgiving and all the good feelings associated with that, Jennings accuses Puritans of dispossessing native people through manipulation of deeds, assaulting native culture and committing genocide like in the Pequot War. He also accuses them of distorting the historical record to justify their actions. It’s a bit much for many people and many of his assertions have since been challenged and modified by subsequent generations of scholars, who took up his challenge to pore over records that had previously gone unexamined. But I think The Invasion of America triggered a new level of debate among historians and anthropologists about the early history of America and helped prompt a new generation of scholarship about American Indian history. If you look at history, you can find evidence of everything. You can find evidence of people who were vicious, manipulative and genocidal, and you can find people who dealt equitably and even-handedly with natives. There are examples where Puritans and Indian people got along – they had to get along because they both needed each other. So you get cautious coexistence across gulfs of culture. But that shifts as the power dynamics shift. As the English presence in New England became more established, they were less reliant on Native American people and less respectful of them. Puritans can be seen as part of colonialism in North America. Looking at their actions in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War, there’s a lot of evidence to support the perspective that Francis Jennings puts forward. The word friendly is a little sketchy. We have to understand those first contacts in context. If we use the term “friendly” it gives this impression of a naive or simple people welcoming the English with open arms. When Squanto meets the Puritans, Squanto has already been to Europe, he’s been kidnapped, taken to Spain, and made his way back home where he found his people, the Patuxet people, essentially decimated by disease. So when the Puritans arrive, that area of New England is not a virgin wilderness – it’s a place that has already been ravaged by disease carried over on boats from England that came up the coast between 1616 and 1619. The impact of those diseases on that coast affected intertribal balances of power. If the Wampanoag people in Massachusetts suffered heavily from disease, other native powers further to the west suffered less so and so there’s a shifting going on in the balance of powers which makes the arrival of a new power, from across the Atlantic, something to be taken seriously. So it behoves the Wampanoag to embrace these people as allies. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Native societies on the east coast of North America have been dealing with other peoples for hundreds of years. Different Indian nations had their own foreign policies, their own sets of relationships, their own rituals for conducting trade, and their own protocols for establishing alliances. It’s important not to see these first contacts as Indian people reacting to English overtures alone. What you have is a multitribal, multinational world in which different Indian nations have their own agendas, their own experiences and their own sets of relations with other native people. Inject into that the presence of these new people. Different nations respond differently. Some incorporate the English into their diplomatic networks. This wasn’t a case of primitive Indians making naive gestures of friendliness."