Review Of "The Indians’ New World" by James Merrel

James Merrell is the one who tweeted out this message. He is well known for being a history professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He was born in 1953 and was raised in Minnesota. Throughout his career, he became a Newberry Fellow at the Newberry Library Center in Chicago to study and research the American Indian. He also joined an organization known as the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OI) in Williamsburg, Virginia. At this institute, he advanced his research on history and culture of early America. In 1984, he started teaching as a professor at Vassar College and continues to do that to this day. He published many books throughout the years he was there, and some of them even became widely known.

One of his known books was his first book titled The Indians' New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (1989). This book was about how the Catawbas were “forced to blend old and new in ways that would permit them to survive in the present without forsaking their past”. Merrell argues for the harsh treatment that the Catawbas endured when encountering the Europeans. For this book, he was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the Bancroft Prize in 1990.

He won another Bancroft Prize in 2000 with his book Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (1999). This book got him nominated to receive the Pulitzer Prize for History in the same year. In 1991, he received the Guggenheim Fellowship from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The language selected for James Merrell’s tweet is a sincere tone expressing pity for the Native Americans, especially for the Catawbas. The tweet conveys a message about what the whites and blacks did to the Indians was terrible and unforgivable. Specifically, the Europeans, they are the ones at fault ever since they encounter them and forge a relationship. This message is towards the audience of those who express sympathy and for families whose ancestors were victims at the time. The username that was given for Merrell represents him teaching as a professor at Vassar College. His profile picture shows him and other well-known people on the day he received his second Bancroft Prize in 2000.

With James Merrell and his tweet, it helps us understand the changes the Indians made when surviving in the New World. The significance of him and his message is to give a very clear sense of how violent the world of the Indians was, especially for the Catawbas. When the Europeans approached them, there were “three stages of contact: disease, traders, and settlers”. Because of diseases, majority of Catawbas have died off since there was no treatment and their survival also depended on trading. When settlers invaded their territory, majority were put to work as slaves to find resources for them.