30 — Wednesday, July 22, 1992 — North Shore News

New World disorder

A Long and Terrible Shadow — White Values, Native Rights in the Americas 1492-1992, By Thomas R. Berger, Douglas & Mctn- tyre, 182 pp., $26.95 hard cover

HOMAS BERGER’S A Long and Terrible Shadowis one more book surveying some aspects of the Euro- pean-native encounter and timed to coincide with the

sesquicentennial of Columbus’ 1492 voyage.

The author uses the broadest of brushes as he explains how white attitudes served to support the systematic suppression of the native peoples of the Americas. He suggests that we face a new opportunity to confront this un- pleasant past and to at long last give native people their due.

Realistically, as Berger points out, we cannot turn back the clock, but there is much that we can do.

But what of this new book? Berger begins his account with the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, giving central place to those “triumphs” and to the efforts of Dominican friar Bar- tolome Las Casas to halt the mistreatment of natives in New Spain.

Berger moves on to a brief but sound discussion of the deadly impact of European-introduced epidemic disease. There foliows a comparison of enslavernent of In- dians by Portuguese in Brazil and by English in the Carolinas with no mention that natives throughout North and South America practis- ed slavery before 1492.

Next we get a brief chapter on the !roquois Confederacy from its inception to the Oka crisis. There follows a chapter on the legal opi- nions of John Marshall (Chief Justice of U.S. Supreme Court 1801-1835) that helped shape U.S. indian policy. The next chapter discusses the late 19th century In- dian wars in the American West and the conquest of the Argenti- nean pampas.

The two following chapters also give more attention to events in Latin America. ‘Reserves, Reser- vations and Reducciones" ex- plores the simiiarities and dif- ferences in Canada, U.S. and Chile. Next we have a chapter on modern-day government ter- torism, ‘Guatemala: Rebirth of the Black Legend,”’ that will shock those unfamiliar with recent de- velopments there, a situation which recalls what authoritarian regimes from the Middle East to Africa and Asia have been and are

LOOKS AT BOOKS

doing to special populations, rais- ing questions about whether “white’’ values are the cause.

Then we move on to the current challenge northern native people face trying to maintain a sub- sistence economy in opposition to doomed government efforts to in- stall a self-supporting ‘‘modern”’ economy and the misdirected energies of anti-fur lobbyists and environmentalists who threaten the survival of a way of life they neither understand nor respect. “Native Claims and the Rule of Law" includes a reprise of the Nisga‘a land claim.

The Epilogue brings our journey to an end.

Berger states that Shadows is “my opportunity to speak for myself.’’ Having presented native views in Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland (1977) on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline inquiry and in Village Journey (1985), dealing with the Alaska Native Review Commission, here he seeks to explain to those ‘‘in the dominant society our ideas about ourselves and atout our attitudes toward native peoples,” and how those attitudes influenced what happened. No one would disagree how those attitudes played a cen- tral role in shaping both policy and action, but it is a subject well covered in several studies over the fast quarter-century.

Presumably, Berger has insights to offer, but there seems little new here. Since he relies heavily on secondary studies, his choice of

See Additional page 38

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