Andrew Newman. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 328 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-3986-9.
Reviewed by Alexandra Montgomery (University of Pennsylvania)
Published on H-Pennsylvania (December, 2015)
Commissioned by Allen J. Dieterich-Ward (Shippensburg University)
It has long been a commonplace of American history that the sources historians use to study Native Americans are problematic at best. This fact has inspired numerous articles, books, and think-pieces, all asking how—and if—anything approaching an accurate portrait of life for North America’s Native people in the first centuries of contact with Europeans can be written. Andrew Newman’s On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory wades into this fray, using Delaware (Lenape) history to examine the tricky question of the relationship between a source and the event it supposedly represents. In the process, Newman complicates many of the charges brought against oral traditions and other sources used to do Native American history by revealing how culturally specific notions of what makes for authoritative proof shape how events are recorded and remembered. All records, including written ones, he suggests, are problematic representations; oral traditions, both Native and European, are simply differently so, which does not mean they do not carry crucial information about the past.
On Records consists of four loosely connected chapters, each of which tackles different incidents in early Lenape history, the sources used to construct them, and their representation and reception. The events Newman focuses on range chronologically from accounts of Lenape origins to the Walking Purchase of 1737, stopping in between to touch on the arrival of the Dutch and William Penn’s famous treaty. Many of the events Newman discusses were first recorded in the early nineteenth century, particularly in John Heckewelder’s 1819 classic An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations that Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States. As a result, while On Records may at first appear to be a work of colonial and precolonial history, it spends much more time discussing the uses and interpretations of Lenape history in the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, from a historical—rather than theoretical—perspective, On Records may function best as an exploration of the place of Lenape people in the consciousness of the Early Republic.
It is the theoretical level, however, that Newman is more interested in. His analysis draws on two multidisciplinary fields interested in how events are represented and passed on to future generations. The first is the idea of language ideology—that is, the idea that different types of linguistic practice, most importantly writing and speech, have different values and meanings attached to them that are not innate, but rather vary from culture to culture. The second is collective memory studies, which holds that the collective process of remembering and forgetting is a key aspect of group identity. These groups, Newman writes, “are defined not only by their collective memories but also by the ways in which they transmit them” (p. 10). European colonists and the Lenapes they encountered formed two distinct memory communities. So, however, did the colonists and their nineteenth-century and modern descendants. The complexities introduced by attempting to mediate between and across memory communities shaped by their own language ideologies is what makes doing history, particularly Native American history, such a fraught process.
Perhaps the best illustration of the warping effects of language ideology comes in the book’s first chapter, where Newman attempts to make sense of the reception history of the Walam Olum. Despite sketchy origins, obvious language errors, and little support by actual Lenape people, the Walam Olum—which first surfaced in 1833 and purported to be an ancient book-like record of the Lenape migration tradition—was nevertheless widely accepted by scholars for generations and was anthologized as late as 2000. Newman argues that unlike some other appropriations of precolonial Native American history, which, particularly during the Removal era, were used to portray Native people as interlopers or invaders, scholars who supported the Walam Olum did so out of a desire to give credit to Delaware civilization. Because of a language ideology that equated writing and book-like methods of event recording with higher civilizations, these scholars were willing to overlook the Walam Olum’s many issues.
Perhaps the most provocative—as well as frustrating—section of the book comes in Newman’s second chapter, “An Account of a Tradition.” Here the author examines accounts of the first arrival of the Dutch, as recorded in Heckewelder. Newman focuses particularly on an aspect of this tradition that has been largely ignored by other scholars: the claim that the Dutch acquired the land for their first fort in Manhattan using the same method of trickery Queen Dido supposedly used in the foundation of Carthage. First asking only for as much land as could be covered by a bull’s hide, the Dutch cut the hide into thin strips that could encircle a much larger plot than that which the Delaware though they were giving up. Most scholars, Newman suggests, have assumed that this part of the tradition was either fabricated by Heckewelder or adopted as a metaphor many years after the fact. In this chapter, however, Newman suggests a third option: that the Dutch, perhaps inspired by Spanish actions in the East Indies, actually used Dido’s tactics. Newman’s globalization of the Dido motif, and his correlation of non-European incidences of the motif to sites of Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonization is highly suggestive. It is far from a watertight case, however, something that Newman himself certainly acknowledges; indeed, his disinterest in actually arguing his case—instead presenting it simply as a possibility—is somewhat frustrating. Regardless of what the reader might make of this claim, however, Newman’s larger point—that oral tradition recorded many years after the fact can serve as a source of non-subjective new information, not just subjective experience or corroboration of the written record—deserves careful consideration by historians, particularly in light of Newman’s discussion of language ideology.
This is a complex book which is difficult to give justice to in a short review, particularly due to the stand-alone nature of Newman’s chapters. It is also only incidentally a book of Lenape or even mid-Atlantic history. Indeed, Newman seems to have chosen the Delaware for this study not for their own sake, but because, via the broad reach of Heckewelder and the notoriety of the Walking Purchase, they came to stand in as iconic or epitomizing eastern Native Americans for many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is therefore not the book to turn to if you are looking for a close study of Delaware history and society in the colonial period, although specialists are sure to find much to engage them. On Records is strongest as a meditation on the problem of proof, sources, and the particular documentary challenges of doing Native American history. It would make excellent fodder for a graduate seminar or methods class, or for anyone looking to problematize or think more deeply about how they are using and understanding their sources, particularly those that deviate from the academic ideal.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-pennsylvania.
Citation:
Alexandra Montgomery. Review of Newman, Andrew, On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory.
H-Pennsylvania, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45199
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |