Ronald Wright’s Stolen Continents offers a different telling of history that refutes Eurocentric assumptions about the seeming Native American acquiescence to Spanish, British, and, to a certain extent, Dutch and French invasion and subsequent colonial policies of assimilation and genocide. This other, counterhegemonic history is one of several forms of resistance Native Americans have employed or appropriated in their effort to oppose the European “myth” of discovery. Acknowledging the difficulty of a comprehensive treatment of Native American resistance, Wright provides a representative sample of post-Columbian texts from five native cultures that still exist in the twentieth century, but that have been “casually and ignorantly dismissed by Western historiography” (p. 6). Wright chose to discuss Aztec, Maya, Inca, Cherokee, and Iroquois cultures of resistance through time, on the basis of the legacy of their written and cultural texts and their continuing tradition of opposition. Their narratives not only have postulated Native American ethnic viability vis-à-vis the European invaders and colonizers, but mark an ongoing and sustaining ideology of resistance.
Stolen Continents proceeds from several positions, although it centers on the Native American perspective of the European invasion and subsequent events. Only recently have Native Americans had the opportunity to tell their history. Before this “rolling back of colonialism,” the history of the Americas was the presentation of European self-legitimating discourse and the subsequent suppression of native discourse. According to Wright, that European discourse was substantiated in several assumptions. These included the rejection of Native American claims of social and cultural equivalency to European societies on the basis of criteria external to Native American civilizations; the implementation of coercive assimilationist policies toward Native Americans in the belief that such policies— particularly those concerned with the concept of property—would contribute to the modernization of the state; and the argument that assimilation was inevitable, either from the conservative perspective of social Darwinism or the socialist perspective, which rejected the colonialist creation of the “Indian.” More recently, in our own sympathetic academic discourse, we have denied Native Americans the ability to perceive the “other,” thereby holding them indirectly accountable for allowing Europeans to conquer them.
Native American resistance took several forms, of which writing history was only one, albeit a significant one. The others included military campaigns, revitalization movements, political manipulation and alliances, and self-validating forms of acculturation (as opposed to assimilation). Not only did Native Americans draw on their own cultural texts, they readily appropriated the text-making tools of the Europeans and quickly articulated arguments of sovereignty and the illegitimacy of European domination.
Stolen Continents is both valuable and accessible. By amassing the colonialist experiences of five different Native American civilizations as expressed in their texts, Wright provides a unique forum for their distinct discourses of resistance. He achieves this in a style that is neither pedantic nor romantic; it simply contextualizes a compelling self-portrait of yet-unvanquished Native American peoples and their indictment of the Europeans who violated their sovereignty.
