Review: On Records

On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory #

By Andrew Newman

University of Nebraska Press, 2012

Newman, Andrew. On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. ISBN 9781496245410.

Andrew Newman starts from a problem that should bother anyone who works in colonial archives. We want records that are authentic, authoritative, and objective; so did the colonists; so did the Lenape leaders who argued with them. Newman argues that this shared craving for a document that would finally settle what happened is itself a historical force, one that has shaped Delaware history from the seventeenth century through the present. Records do not simply preserve a past. They get made, contested, forged, misremembered, and deployed. Following Newman, I will argue that treating records as media rather than as windows changes what the Lenape past looks like, and that this reframing (not any new account of what happened) is the book's real contribution to Indigenous Studies.

Four cases, one problem #

The book comprises an introduction, four chapters, and an afterword. The first chapter, "Lenape Annals," takes up the Walam Olum, the pictographic migration narrative that Constantine Rafinesque introduced in the 1830s and that David Oestreicher's research later exposed as a fabrication. Newman has no interest in debunking it again. He wants to know why so many readers, for so long, needed it to be genuine, and his answer runs as follows: the Walam Olum filled a lacuna that scholarship had already carved out, an indigenous record, in an indigenous medium, that would let Lenape history begin without colonists. Calling it indigenous apocrypha rather than simply a hoax lets him ask what the forgery reveals about its audience (the humbuggery, in other words, tells us more about the duped than the huckster).

"An Account of a Tradition" turns to Delaware oral accounts of first contact, including the widely circulated story of land measured out by a hide cut into a single thin strip. The motif has classical ancestry in the founding of Carthage, and literary scholars have often used that resemblance to dismiss the tradition as borrowed. Newman pushes the other way. He argues the analogue does not cancel the tradition's evidentiary value, and that the story preserves something real about how Dutch and English claimants actually operated. This move is the boldest in the book, and the one most likely to draw disagreement.

The last two chapters, "The Most Valuable Record" and "Writings and Deeds," settle into Pennsylvania. Here Newman works across the Shackamaxon treaty tradition, Benjamin West's painting of Penn meeting the Delawares, the wampum belts held up as proof of what was agreed, the deeds and maps behind the 1737 Walking Purchase, and Teedyuscung's insistence in the 1750s that treaty proceedings be recorded and that he receive his own copies. That last episode is the book in miniature. A Delaware spokesman confronting a fraudulent land grab does not reject the colonial record; he demands access to it and tries to make one of his own. Literacy here is not assimilation. Literacy is leverage.

Reading maps and belts as texts #

Newman is a literary scholar, and the method shows in the best way. He reads a wampum belt, a survey line, and a history painting with the same attention he gives a treaty minute, and he refuses to let any one medium arbitrate the others. This refusal is the book's methodological contribution to Indigenous Studies. It puts pressure on the record/representation distinction that historians often assume and literary critics often ignore, and it does so without collapsing into the claim that everything is equally fictional; Newman keeps insisting that some accounts are better supported than others while denying that the written ones automatically win.

The book sits comfortably alongside Matt Cohen's work on colonial New England's publication systems and Lisa Brooks's on Native writing in the Northeast, and it belongs in any conversation about wampum as a communicative technology rather than decoration. Vis-à-vis the Lenape historiography of Francis Jennings, Steven Craig Harper, and Amy Schutt, Newman offers less a new account of what the Walking Purchase did than a new account of how its documentation worked.

Where it strains #

The four chapters read as strong linked essays more than as a cumulative argument. Each persuades on its own terms, and the introduction works hard to bind them, but the connective tissue thins in the middle. The concept of "the record" stretches to cover a great deal, and at moments it stretches far enough to lose discriminating power. Angela Calcaterra's review in Commonplace raises a related worry that seems right to me: it is not always clear what memory studies supplies that Native American and Indigenous Studies scholarship had not already worked out on its own terms.

The afterword is the weakest section. Its move from the Native remains associated with Ellis and Liberty Islands to the digital Mannahatta and Welikia reconstructions is suggestive, but it gestures more than it argues, and the two cases would each support a chapter. Living Lenape communities, meanwhile, stay mostly at the edges of the frame. Newman donates royalties to the Lenape Native American Foundation, which signals a politics the book does not otherwise develop; a study so attentive to who controls the record could say more about who controls it now.

Verdict #

In short, On Records is a smart, disciplined, sometimes exhilarating book, and the Walam Olum chapter alone justifies the price of admission. Early Americanists should read it; so should literary scholars working on colonial textuality, anyone teaching the Walking Purchase, and graduate students who need a model of what it looks like to take oral tradition seriously as evidence without romanticizing it. Readers who want a narrative history of the Delawares should look elsewhere. Readers who want to think harder about what an archive is will find plenty here.