Stolen Continents: The New World Through Indian Eyes / Ronald Wright

Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Trade paperback. Minor rubbing and edge wear. VG. 

Ronald Wright’s Stolen Continents offers a different telling of history that refutes Eurocentric assumptions about the seeming Native American acquiescence to Spanish, British, and, to a certain extent, Dutch and French invasion and subsequent colonial policies of assimilation and genocide. This other, counterhegemonic history is one of several forms of resistance Native Americans have employed or appropriated in their effort to oppose the European “myth” of discovery. Acknowledging the difficulty of a comprehensive treatment of Native American resistance, Wright provides a representative sample of post-Columbian texts from five native cultures that still exist in the twentieth century, but that have been “casually and ignorantly dismissed by Western historiography” (p. 6). Wright chose to discuss Aztec, Maya, Inca, Cherokee, and Iroquois cultures of resistance through time, on the basis of the legacy of their written and cultural texts and their continuing tradition of opposition. Their narratives not only have postulated Native American ethnic viability vis-à-vis the European invaders and colonizers, but mark an ongoing and sustaining ideology of resistance.

Stolen Continents proceeds from several positions, although it centers on the Native American perspective of the European invasion and subsequent events.