461 - The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America

The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America
James Axtell
New York, Oxford, 1985. 389 pp. $29.95.

In this, the first of three volumes that Axtell has projected on "The Cultural Origins of North America," the author chronicles the efforts of French, English, and Indians "to convert each other." In this competition, if in no other way, colonial society prefigured the Kingdom: the first were last, the last first. Englishmen, ostensibly triumphant over the others, fared less well than either when it came to spiritual and cultural conquest. Indians, though overrun by the whites, and though their outer lives could be

462 - The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America

"partially reduced to civility" in European terms, were able successfully to resist "the invasion within"-the challenge to their cultural identity. More than that, Indians proved themselves "psychologically if not numerically ... the best cultural missionaries and educators on the continent."

Axtell may overdo the contrast, in methods and results, between the adaptive Jesuits and the obsessively civilizing English Protestants; and I think he underplays the differences between even the more intrusive missionaries and most of their fellow invaders. But the book is a major achievement-prodigiously researched, entertainingly written, and nearly (though not quite) as understanding of Europeans in their cultural captivity as of the Indians they sought to ensnare in European culture.

William R. Hutchison
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.