Phillip H. Round

The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (review)

Among the many cryptic statements to be found in early American texts, two stand out as symptomatic of the problems readers face in trying to interpret just how Native peoples were viewed by the English and what it means for British cultural history. The first is Edward Winslow’s famous aphoristic summation of the way the Plymouth Colony was funded and administered—and the way it went about its relations with Native communities. ‘‘Religion and profit jump together,’’ Winslow said. The second appears a century later as the concluding statement to Samson Occom’s manuscript Personal Narrative. ‘‘They have used me thus,’’ Occom complains of the New England missionary society, ‘‘because I am a poor Indian.’’ Worse still, Occom protests, ‘‘I did not make myself so.’’ Laura Stevens’s fascinating study of the emergence of English Protestant missionary discourse during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries goes a long way toward clarifying what both men meant, explaining how such utterances made a good deal of sense in the colonial worlds each inhabited. The Poor Indiansmakes it clear that from the beginning profit and religion did indeed ‘‘jump together’’ in the North American British missionary enterprise and that ‘‘missionary writings often equated financial transactions with spiritual ones’’ (7). In the process, ‘‘an optimistic moral philosophy intertwined with a culture of sensibility’’ to found ‘‘a benevolent imperialist rhetoric’’ (33) that served as a ‘‘justification for colonialism’’ (43). Her book also shows that Occom was right. He had not made himself a ‘‘poor Indian.’’ He had been cast in that role by more than a century

Dos Americanos, Dos Pensamientos: Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora y Cotton Mather (review)

again, its readings sift ably through the ideological sediment of race—and stop there. The book would benefit at times from pushing the argument one step beyond the thematic motif of ‘‘ambiguity’’ or ‘‘contradiction.’’ What does it mean to say, for example, that Robinson Crusoe ‘‘simultaneously establishes and undermines racial differences’’ ()? Or that the English imperial novel shows both the ‘‘avowal and disavowal of complexion’s significance’’ ()? The limitations of this kind of argument sometimes derive, I think, from her lack of engagement with authorship. Too often literary works become mere repositories of historical formation and litanies for categories of difference. Why, in other words, would Defoe in Captain Singleton belie the ‘‘double standard’’ (), where Europeans maintain a resilient cultural identity while trading in foreign places yet Africans show a much more ‘‘malleable’ ’’one? Such critiques tend to accompany important books—and Wheeler’s certainly is one. No longer can we talk about ‘‘race’’ in this era in isolation from either transatlantic considerations or the multiple contexts for human ‘‘variety.’’