[From Isonomia Quarterly 4.1 Spring 2026. Read the full article at Isonomia Quarterly.]
There’s little question that the Americas have been irrevocably modified by European contact. The decimation and sociopolitical transformation of the Western Hemisphere was so thorough that many students converse of an indigenous genocide—the intentional destruction of native societies. However there’s additionally little question that the story just isn’t so easy.
During the last fifty years, many students have steadily added nuance to it by displaying how native company—the common human will and skill to behave—impacted Euro–Indian diplomatic relations and overseas coverage, the conduct of commerce, and the newcomers’ possession, settlement, and pleasure of the land. So vital was the affect of native peoples that European governments and their colonial populations couldn’t merely push the locals apart. Colonial domination was not a foregone conclusion, not less than not within the quick time period.
But despite all this nice scholarship on native energy, the overall define of European contact and what adopted it stays just about unchanged: American Indians have been finally hopeless to cease European enlargement. They have been nearly destined for extinction or for the sociopolitical margin, to make manner for brand spanking new peoples and their aggressive market order. It’s unusual how little this narrative has modified. The rationale for the stasis, I feel, is framing. A lot nuance has been added, sure, however the identical structural framework stays: natives versus whites, supposed tribal communism versus so-called European capitalism, arrows versus gunpowder, stone versus iron.
These divisions have one factor in widespread: They’re all extraordinarily broad and due to this fact inflexible. Underneath these thematic frameworks, the nuances of time and place can’t actually be woven into the story. There’s no place for them, so that they find yourself within the bin of exceptions and different odd scraps of historical past. On this essay I invite readers to interpret the historical past of the Americas by means of a extra helpful thematic lens: rulers versus topics
[Read the full article at Isonomia Quarterly.]
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