AMERICAN HISTORIANS AND INDIANS

Abstract

United States's historians are almost alone in the scholarly world in using the term ‘Indian’ to describe the original inhabitants of the landmass that came to be called the Americas. The term is an artefact of Christopher Columbus's imagination, and it conditions American historiography in ways that reflect the particular logic of the first contact that Columbus initiated. This review draws upon several recent books in native history, as well as a few older ones, to explicate how Columbian logic has informed the evolution of such scholarship and to suggest new ways of thinking about contact, colonization, and acculturation in the Americas. The concept of ‘creolization’, developed by francophone and anglophone scholars in the Caribbean, it is argued, offers a particularly interesting and constructive way to imagine a different history of America's first and second peoples.