Conclusion

The more we learn about the depth of indigenous histories, the more informed our imperial histories will be—and also our attempts at comparisons between them. Once historians acknowledge that relations with Europeans were ultimately shaped by dynamic processes within and between different and distinct indigenous communities, for example, we might understand better why there was such a plurality of outcomes when Europeans and indigenous peoples came together.

As Stuart Banner has pointed out, even within the same empire, there were quite different ‘settlements’ with indigenous peoples around the ownership of land, compensation and treaty rights.³⁸

In turn, such comparisons underscore the vitality of indigenous agency in shaping the larger colonial process in profound ways, for better and for worse. There is no doubt, of course, that an increasingly repressive policy characterised European imperialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet even in places where and moments when Europeans deployed a more overt strategy of military pacification, as in colonial Australia, the ‘outcome of the invasion was always more complicated than the invaders might have hoped’. Ultimately, indigenous resistance often brought a renewed focus on the colonial situation, sometimes leading missionaries and reformers to change the course of imperial politics and policy. As Heather Goodall notes, if one digs a little below the surface, European—Aboriginal history becomes as complex, ambiguous and rich as that between Europeans and indigenous peoples elsewhere. These histories of contact were complicated, and multifaceted. And the complications matter.³⁹

Finally, when we ‘face empire’ we are also compelled to think about a different kind of imperial and, indeed, global history—one that moves us beyond the idea of an almost always destructive frontier.

For to recognise both the depth of indigenous histories before contact, and the depth of histories of contact, there is, in the end, a need to recognise the depth of indigenous histories after contact—the webs of indigenous history that stretch to the present day. Thus, while it is important to acknowledge the power of conflict and its often violent, destructive effects for indigenous people, we have to concede that these conflicts were often, at least metaphorically speaking, conducted at the water’s edge. They were the most obvious outcomes, but not the only outcomes, and were not the experience of everyone involved. Even in the midst of violence and dispossession, there existed sometimes thickening webs of cooperation, resistance, familial and gendered strategies of persistence and other developments occurring beyond the prying eyes of imperial officials or colonial settlers. While histories must account for the violence of the colonial encounter, they must also give space to, and anticipate, stories of persistence. Only then will we cease to be surprised at the so-called re-emergence of those who have been, in Susan Sleeper-Smith’s words, ‘hiding in plain sight’.⁴⁰

In doing so, we might yet be able to write enmeshed histories—even of the revolutionary period—that do better justice to the richness of colonial encounters; histories that recognise the depth and breadth of the pasts that both natives and newcomers brought to those encounters and the complicated and ambiguous legacy of relations with indigenous peoples on both sides. At the same time, these histories might be able to comprehend the profound role played by indigenous peoples in the history of exploration, settlement, science, medicine and thought.

Notes

1 C.A. Bayly, ‘British and Indigenous Peoples’, in MJ. Daunton and R. Halpern (eds), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600--1850 (London, 1999), p. 21.

2 See Michael A. McDonnell, ‘Facing Empire: Indigenous Histories in Comparative Perspective’, in Kate Fullagar (ed.), The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations Since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2012), pp.

220-236.

3 Much of the following discussion in these initial paragraphs is drawn from Michael A. McDonnell, Negotiating Empires: Anishinaabe, French, and Metis Peoples and the Making and Unmaking of the Atlantic World (New York, forthcoming, 2014).

4 See Heather Goodall, ‘Reclaiming Cultural Flows: Aboriginal People, Settlers and the Darling River', in Alan Mayne and Stephen Atkinson (eds), Outside Country: A History of Inland Australia (Adelaide, 2011), p. 89.

5 See, for example, Peter H. Wood, ‘From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach', in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford, 2009), esp. pp. 284-287.

6 Daniel Claus to William Johnson, 3 December 1761, The Papers of Sir William Johnson, Vol. III (Albany, 1921), p. 576.

7 William Johnson, ‘Review of the Trade', 1767, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, hereafter NYCD, Vol. VII (Albany, 1856), pp. 957, 958-959, 966-967.

8 Amherst to Bouquet, 7 August 1763, Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society Collections, Vol. XIX (Lansing, 1892), p. 224.

9 Quoted in Fred Anderson, Crucible of War (London, 2000), p. 542.

10 See Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, and Slaves and the Making of the Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999); and Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York, 2007).

11 Richard White, ‘The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', Journal of American History, Vol. 65 (Sept. 1978), pp. 319-345; Pekka Hamalainen, ‘The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Culture', Journal of American History, Vol. 90 (Dec. 2003), pp. 833-862.

12 William L. Clements (ed.), Journal of Major Robert Rogers (Worcester, MA, 1918), pp. 11-12, 27.

13 Johnson, ‘Review of the Trade', 1767, NYCD VII, 958-959.

14 F. Ermatinger, ‘Earliest Expedition against Puget Sound Indians', in Eva Emery Dye (ed.), Washington Historical Quarterly, Vol.

1 (1907), pp. 22-29; Alexandra Harmon, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley, 1998); Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710--1795 (Berkeley, 2012).

15 See Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Roads of the Wind: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands (Berkeley, 2000); and Keith Smith, Mari Nawi: Aboriginal Odysseys (Dural, 2010).

16 Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures (Cambridge, 2012), p. 134.

17 Anne Salmond, ‘Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different: European and Tahitian Navigators in the 18th Century', History and Anthropology (2006), p. 172.

18 Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, p. 135.

19 See ibid., p. 134.

20 Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York, 2003), pp. 80-135, 292-334.

21 Matsuda, Pacific Worlds, p. 140.

22 Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans 1642--1772 (Auckland, 1991), pp. 387-396.

23 Ibid, pp. 361-362.

24 Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (New York, 2004) p. 291.

25 John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (Melbourne, forthcoming, 2013), chap. 6.

26 Cited in Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit, p. 173.

27 See Keith Smith, Bennelong (Sydney, 2001), pp. 52-59.

28 Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (Melbourne, 2003), p. 272.

29 Cited in J. Fornasiero, P. Monteath, and J. West-Sooby, Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders (Kent Town, SA, 2010), p. 360.

30 Cited in John Dunmore, Where Fate Beckons: The Life of Jean-Franyois de la Perouse (Chicago, 2008), p. 248.

31 Dunmore, Where Fate Beckons, p. 243.

32 Salmond, Two Worlds, p. 364.

33 See Fornasiero et al., Encountering Terra Australis, pp. 9-10.

34 Matthew Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, Vol. I (London, 1814), pp.

cxciii-cxciv.

35 See Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History (Melbourne, 2013), pp. 43-46.

36 Fornasiero et al., Encountering Terra Australis, p. 362.

37 Citizen Baudin, letter to King, 23 December 1802, cited in Colin Dyer, The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australian 1772--1839 (St Lucia, 2005), pp. 199-200.

38 Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

39 Heather Goodall, ‘New South Wales', in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown (St Leonards, 1995), pp. 55-62, quote on p. 65.

40 Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, 2001), p. 9.

Conclusion

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