Virginia DeJohn Anderson

Interesting book on how livestock were central to the encounter between English colonists and Indians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The English assumed that livestock cultivation would both allow the English settlers to control the new lands, transforming them into private property, and “civilize” Indians. But that’s not what happened for a very long time—instead, because of limited labor resources, the colonists regularly let their livestock run wild, which led to more conflict with Indians since the colonists wouldn’t stick to the land they said they wanted. Indians tried to integrate the new animals into their existing worldviews, but colonists often had the raw military power to insist both on their special status as property—even if wandering free in the woods—and on their subordinate status as nonhumans, contrary to many Indian understandings of the natural world. “As agents of empire, livestock occupied land in advance of English settlers, forcing native peoples who stood in their way either to fend the animals off as best they could or else to move on.” Anderson suggests that the intrusions of livestock can explain why Indian violence was primarily directed against settler property, not settler persons, including why they would sometimes mutilate animals instead of carrying them off to eat. Indians knew how much livestock mattered to the English, and the animals had “amply earned the Indians’ enmity in their own right” by destroying Indians’ cultivated crops and eating the plants that deer had previously consumed.… (més)