Turtle Talk

Greg Gagnon’s review of Constance Cappel’s monograph “The Smallpox Genocide of the Odawa Tribe at L’Arbre Croche, 1763: The History of a Native American People” is here (smallpox-genocide-review). It is not terribly favorable. Here is the full text:

Publication of American Indian perspectives on history is a positive trend that provides an antidote to colonizers’ perspectives. However, the antidote should not be a mirror image of previous bias. Cappel’s thesis is that unnamed British officials gave tins of smallpox spores to Odawa from L’Arbre Croche in 1763. This genocide “changed the course of history.” Substantiation comes from Web sites and Andrew Blackbird’s History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan (1887), augmented by speculation related to Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s infamous letter. Cappel also indicates that copper from Michigan was traded to Mediterranean civilizations to create the Bronze Age; the Odawa community of L’Arbre Croche numbered around 30,000; scalping began in 1756; the French “encouraged an addiction to rum”; tens of thousands of Indians under a flag of truce were murdered by the British; and both the League of Nations and UN were modeled on the Indian system. One function of this book is its illustration of the ubiquity of plot theories and the historical inaccuracies that form their bases. It also demonstrates a beginning stage in historiography that includes Indian sources. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students and faculty only.G. Gagnon, University of North Dakota

I also had some of the same concerns with this work. There are enough doubters about the origins of smallpox epidemics in Indian Country that a work like this could be very useful, but it lacks the primary documentation that doubters demand.

On the other hand, Simon Otto’s wonderful preface should remind us that the oral histories contained in works like these remain invaluable.