Defining History Essay, Research Paper
In the document, “Indians: Textualism, Morality, and The Problem of History,” Jane Tompkins
examines the conflicts between the English settlers and the American Indians. After examining
several primary sources, Tompkins found that different history books have different
perspectives. It wasn t that the history books took different angles that was troubling, but the
viewpoints contradicted one another. People who experience the same event told it through their
reality. This becomes a problem when a person who didn t experience the effect wants to know
what happened. Tompkins said, “The problem id that if all accounts of events are determined
through and through by the observer s frame of reference, that one will never know, in any given
case what really happened (202).”
The problem was evident when Tompkins was researching the history of the Europeans and
Indians. She started her inquiry with the book Errand into the Wilderness by Perry Miller. In the
preface of his book Tompkins found that Miller didn t even recognize the Indian s existence in
America, calling it “vacant.” The fact is that there were Indians here, Miller just didn t see
history in that light. Secondly, Tompkins went to the book, New England Frontier Puritans and
Indians, 1620-1675 authored by Alden Vuaghan in 1965. This Vuaghan s angle toward
American history was antipodal to Miller, even though the writers spoke of the same effects.
Vuaghan recognized the Indian s presence, he speaks of the European settlers and Indians not
only having humane, considerate relationships, but using their differences to help one another
(205). Tompkins claims this to be irrelevant, saying his viewpoint was biased. Moving on to
another contradictory perspective, Tompkins examines the perspective of Francis Jenning s The
Invasion of America written in the late sixties. Jennings saw the European settlers to brutal
animals,
“the early settlers lied to the Indians, stole form them, murdered them, scalped them, captured
them, tortured them, raped them, soled the into slavery, confiscated their land, destroyed their
crops, burned their homes, scattered their possessions, gave them alcohol, undermined their
systems of belief, and infected them with diseases that wiped out ninety percent of their numbers
within the first hundred years after contact.” (206)
Examining further Tompkins saw another change of perspectives in the seventies, caused by the
American Indian Movement. Calvin Martin, author of Keepers of the Game saw the European
settlement as an invasion of the Indian s spiritual relationship with the animals. Because of fur
trade with the Europeans, the Indian s discontinued their spiritual ritual of worshipping the
animal s carcass. When disease started spreading among the Indians, brought over by the
Europeans, they thought it was because the spirits were angry with them. Martin refers to this
time as a “holy war.” The pattern of contradictions continued with a series of essays called
Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade by Charles Hudson written three years after Martins book.
Hudson said it wasn t about religion, rather it was about economic relations.
The paradoxes keep on with the issues of how captured European children were treated by the
Indians, James Axtell believed the children were taken and made more comfortable with nature,
enhancing their lives. To the contrary, White into Red by Norman Heard addresses the treatment
of captured children as cruel, claming many times the babies and toddlers were murdered (209).
The inconsistency of views continue until Tompkins says, “It may well seem to you at this point
that, given the tremedous variation amoung the historical accounts, I had no choice but to end in
relativism. (213)”
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