- Author has an uphill battle against her colonial sources
- They deliberately minimalize or completely omit the importance/participation of
native women in their diplomatic debate or their agreements
- Sources are not to be read to be believed they are read to be seen through and taken apart
- She rarely accepts documentation as accurate
- Focusing on who is missing, what isn’t being said, why it’s missing and how the
subjects are avoided/the space is filled
- Even looks beyond her sources to create “scenarios” she believes could have
happened
- “Scenarios” are helpful as a reader, but not as a historian
- Told in a story format
- Establishes the stark contrast between Europeans and Indigenous people
- Humanizes characters she writes about and their perspectives
- Forces some imagined truth from her colonial sources
- Maintains a more consistent narrative that attracts the reader
- However, these “scenarios” are not well enough distinguished from her factual
statements and her direct quotes from sources
- Although they are good for a narrative, the lack of distinction makes me wonder
about inner bias projection and possible over exaggerations to push a narrative
- Gendered views not just against people, but also against lands
- Natives see land as a generous mother who is sharing her “body” to feed her
children
- Europeans see it as a fertile and lustful area “pregnant with possibility”
- Less about historical facts as the war happens, more about why these things happened
and their importance
- Comparison against wikipedia
- Women are only mentioned as “women and children…”
- Focus on militarization, on male Natives in powerful positions,
- Many lines of statistics
- No mention of English manipulation, English inner politics, steamrolling on
Native policies
- Land sale tension is less emphasized
- “Failure of diplomacy” doesn’t highlight the Native attempts and
European rejection of that diplomacy
- The book brings into question the suspicious circumstances of Wamsuttas death,
whereas the wikipedia article does not even mention it
- This shows the wikipedia article lacks much of the context that is required
to understand the tension between the natives and the Europeans
- This seems to be placing the blame back onto the Natives for picking
fights undeservedly, when really they had ample cause to be upset