Routledge Companions. London: Routledge, 2022. 778 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$57.00, paper; US$270.00, cloth; US$52.00, ebook. ISBN 9781032077406.
This edited volume is composed of an introduction and six thematic sections, comprising 33 chapters in all. The chapters are short and to the point and include extensive bibliographies. A number of the chapters are by Indigenous scholars writing about their own families revealing the continuing effects of violent and destructive colonial policies of exclusion, displacement, and assimilation on Indigenous peoples who are working to reclaim their past. It is an epic chore to produce a world history of any sort, and the editors have made a valiant effort to select and organize the chapters to produce a very useful volume.
The title on the front cover tells us that the book concerns history and, implicitly, is written by historians. This approach is a strength in that it limits the topics and methods employed by authors, yet leaves out the contributions of those working in other disciplines, including geography and anthropology among others, who have pioneered and contributed to the literatures concerning Indigenous peoples worldwide. To a limited degree, archaeology is included in the volume. The back cover tells us that Indigenous histories have resonances for the politics of the present, a central claim of this volume not always shared by others.
The strongest chapter, by Joy Porter, concerns North American Indigenous treaties seen from a global perspective. The strength here is how Porter shows the importance of historic treaties for treaty negotiations and for human rights today. She considers treaties from the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe and reveals the capacity of and limits to Indigenous agency in the negotiation of the place of Indigenous people in nation-states. Still, the author claims: “All communities and individuals living on American land are in this sense, ‘treaty people’…” (261). Except that they are not. Within the territories of the US and Canada today are several hundred thousand peoples whose communities are not recognized under US or Canadian law or any version of treaty law. Some, such as those in British Columbia, Canada, have formal relations with the nation-state but have no treaties, despite in some cases, the desire to have them. This is a serious scholarly oversight.
In B. W. Higman’s fine chapter, he points out that the Caribbean was the site of the earliest European settlement in Americas and suffered rapid depopulation in some areas, and with the rise of the sugar plantation slavery system established in the seventeenth century there was little place for Indigenous people. Much of this chapter examines the complex mixing of peoples and cultures and the rise of new and complex ethnic identities, including Taino, Carib, Garifuna, and others. This chapter then shifts focus to considering the role of DNA in contemporary claims of identity, supporting connections to First Peoples in some instances and undermining them in others. Higman notes that after the revolution of 1959, Cuba pushed a form of unity that obliterated ethnic differences (515). He also points to contemporary acts of Caribbean resurgence, including demands for apologies for colonialism. Further, he notes the new understandings of indigeneity as portable, in which legitimate Indigenous peoples can live in places other than where their ancestors lived; and “new people” can become Indigenous without descent from the peoples living in the Caribbean at the time of the arrival of Europeans.
One chapter, “Rethinking the colonial encounter in the Age of Trauma” (Taylor Spence), contains a rather strange and misplaced interpretation of the subfield of ethnohistory. Spence writes that “[e]thnohistory’s encounters imply that history began when Europeans arrived” (346). Do they? There is no acknowledgment of the origin of ethnohistory in the efforts by historians and anthropologists to address treaty violations under the terms established by the US Indian Claims Commission in 1946 and the use of oral historical content in this litigation work. Further, a quick look at any issue of the journal Ethnohistory will show engagement with the period before European contact. The chapter also contains a useful but too-short look at the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies and neglects to consider the new epigenetics studies and the implications for intergenerational trauma. More positively, this author makes the provocative claim that “[a]ll modern nation-states arose from imperialism and colonialism. Therefore, modern nation-states are trauma states . . . ” (345). I credit him for the boldness of this position and note that the few pages he is allotted in this volume only allow him to be suggestive.
Another chapter, “Indigenous peoples in Asia: a long history” (Robert Cribb), presents a useful view of Indigenous history in Asia, starting with a concise discussion of why the issues are different from those in North America and Australia. But the chapter is dated in places, including the erroneous claim that there is no formal recognition of Taiwan Indigenous peoples, citing a 2002 source (102). And, there is a good discussion of oral histories of deep time, termed “geomythology,” but this chapter misses current literature on “real science” hypothesis testing instead of mere side-by-side comparisons of oral history and archaeology and an exchange between Henige, Martindale, and Menzies in issues of the Journal of Northwest Anthropology.
The last chapter, by editor Ann McGrath, offers a fine conclusion to the volume by examining deep history from another angle, accounting for tens of thousands of years and beyond modernity’s shallow time frame. She argues for the use of new media platforms in which Indigenous history can be rethought and points to digital platforms which concern, for example, mapping of Indigenous sites or repatriation efforts. Indeed, this is happening all over the Indigenous world and will dramatically alter perspectives on Indigenous history.
Bruce Granville Miller
University of British Columbia, Vancouver