Review by Dr. Joseph Bruchac
Director, The Greenfield Review Literary Center


"No lie is so strong that it cannot be undone by the truth." Those
words were first spoken to me more than three decades ago by Stephen
Laurent, an Abenaki Indian elder, while we were discussing the
historical episode known as "Roger's Raid," an attack by American
rangers on the Abenaki village of Odanak in 1759 that was meant to
wipe out the "treacherous" St. Francis Indians. That event, four
years before the Odawa smallpox epidemic of 1763, has usually been
portrayed as a great American victory and the birth of the elite
military commandos known as Green Berets. But the story is quite
different when seen through Indian eyes. Although Rogers claimed to
have wiped out the St. Francis Abenakis, the majority of our
community escaped. However, the true story of our survival has only
widely been made known in recent years.
I mention this event from Abenaki history because it is part of the
same struggle for Native survival in the northeast and Great Lakes
region that the Odawa managed to survive (like my own Abenaki
people) despite the terrible odd against them. Like the Odawas, the
Abenakis were the victims and survivors of nothing less than an
attempt at genocide. Further, as was the case with the Abenakis, the
Odawas then found their history told in a very one-sided,
inaccurate, and even racist manner by historians who strongly sided
with the "winning side."
The story of the Odawa and the charismatic Odawa leader Pontiac was
first told in print by the American historian Francis Parkman in the
book that became a classic of American history "The Conspiracy of
Pontiac," published in 1860 while Parkman was a member of the
faculty of Harvard University. While the chronology of the events
that Parkman relates is, in general, accurate, Parkman's views and
his conclusions are marred by an assumption of the cultural
superiority of the English.
Parkman portrayed
American Indians as stereotyped figures--self-centered, conceited,
revengeful savages who might be be brave, but were ignorant of
western culture and barely elevated above the beasts of the field.
Part of Cappel's highly effective approach is to give us as much
information as possible.
Rather than just mentioning the word "smallpox," she gives a history
of the disease among Native nations, describing its ravages and how
easily it can be spread.
In a similar way, she
paints a picture of who Francis Parkman was, summarizes his views
and places them in the historical context of American in the 18th
and 19th centuries. Only then does she demonstrate how limited and
incorrect this view of the Odawa and other 18 century
Native peoples was. As Cappel points out quite effectively, the Odawa
had their own view of this period and still remember that deliberate
introduction of smallpox among the Odawa by the British. That memory
was not only held by Odawa oral traditions, but expressed in
well-crafted prose by Andrew Blackbird, an American Indian writer
who published his own history of his Odawa people in 1887. In his
little-known book, Blackbird not only told the history of the Odawas
but also corrected mistakes made by Parkman and others.
Unfortunately, while Parkman's book went on to be a "classic,"
Blackbird's was largely
neglected. That Cappel quite successfully draws attention back to
Blackbird is only one of the significant contributions of "The
Smallpox Genocide of the Odawa Tribe at L'Arbre Croche, 1763: The
History of a Native American People."
Cappel's book might be regarded by some as "revisionist history," a
term I dislike because of the implication that it is simply an
attempt to swing the pendulum of opinion in as radical; a direction
to one side as it had previously been swung to the other. This is
not, however, a rewriting of history to favor one side, but a
measured review of that history taking all the facts into
consideration. I believe it has the potential to be the
authoritative view on not only the experience of a Native nation
with a terrible pathogen, but also the best text to understand the
Odawa people. Further, she does not just leave the Odawa in the
past--as do so many books on tribal nations--making them seem like
insects trapped in amber. Drawing on information shared with her by
a number of Odawa tribal officials and elders she brings the Odawa
story up to the present day, pointing out that many of the struggles
of the past continue into the present.
This is a highly readable, informative, and well-thought out book,
one that should be equally welcomed by mainstream historians and
Native people.