The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast

The term frontier is usually associated with terrestrial boundaries, but it can also be fruitfully applied to waterways, as Lipman, assistant professor of history at Barnard College, makes clear in this study of 17th-century Native American–European interactions. As English and Dutch colonists clashed with one another and with the indigenous inhabitants of the northeastern coastline of North America, they “ruptured the social fabric of this shore.” But while Native Americans “lost most of their lands, in the process they discovered an ocean.” Emphasizing that “Indians met Europeans as fellow mariners,” Lipman offers a vivid and frequently agonizing description of the ways in which Anglo-Dutch struggles to establish viable colonial outposts shattered the traditions and communities of the coastal Algonquians—which caused the latter to turn ever more toward the sea as a source of employment, food, and trade goods. Despite the immense challenges they faced from European imperialism, reorienting themselves toward the ocean helped spare some indigenous peoples from drowning “in the currents of modernity.” Written in lucid and graceful prose, and drawing on Dutch and English governmental records and private papers, Native traditions, material culture, and archaeological investigations, Lipman’s impressive work is crucial reading for historians as well as environmental studies scholars. Maps and illus. [em](Nov.) [/em]