... a work of historical recovery.

Determined not to be clouded by a white imperial perspective, Dodds Pennock tries hard to avoid the pitfalls of traditional 'explorer' narratives. That is to be applauded, but occasionally her overly righteous academic analysis pulls the reader too far from the experiences of her subjects. Her mission to change our perspective can also veer towards the moralistic, which is a shame, because the stories and lives she has unearthed are fascinating in themselves.

In principle all this sounds fascinating, and at its heart is a very imaginative premise. What undermines it, though, is that Dodds Pennock’s stories don’t go anywhere.

Unhelpfully, Caroline Dodds Pennock excludes indigenous people’s archives as a means of illuminating their feelings. She mistakenly supposes that ‘we rarely are able to hear indigenous voices’; but she is right in saying ‘it is easier to find documents about European attitudes to indigenous peoples than about indigenous attitudes to Europeans’.

... a difficult, dense read that soundly challenges many modern ideas.

Pennock is good on the particularities... which she describes pithily and sympathetically. When it comes to the general, however, she is all over the place. Her estimates of the numbers of indigenous Americans in Europe are understandably vague, given the patchiness of records. But they are also consistently inconsistent.

Diligently and creatively mining primary source material, Dodds Pennock illuminates the Indigenous impact on European culture, including... the invaluable, if often unacknowledged, role Native peoples served in helping Europeans navigate the diverse cultures and geographies of colonized lands. This innovative and powerful account breaks down long-standing historical assumptions..

In bringing these stories to light, Pennock creates a sharp challenge to Eurocentrism during the Colonial age.