A Strange Likeness

by Nancy Shoemaker

The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as a series of cultural conflicts and misunderstandings based on a vast gulf of difference. Nancy Shoemaker turns this notion on its head, showing that Indians and Europeans shared commonbeliefs about their most fundamental realities--land as national territory, government, record-keeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body.Before they even met, Europeans and Indians shared perceptions of a landscape marked by mountains and rivers, a physical world in which the sun rose and set every day, and a human body with its own distinctive shape. They also shared in their ability to make sense of it all and to invent new,abstract ideas based on the tangible and visible experiences of daily life...