CHAPTER ONE Views from Academia: Indian–Dutch History
Scholars such as John Fiske, Edmund O’Callaghan, John Brodhead, Frederick Zwierlein, Ellis Raesly, Allen Trelease, George Smith, Laurence Hauptman, Thomas Burke, Denys Delâge, Matthew Dennis, Nan Rothschild, and Donna Merwick have treated Indian and Dutch cultures as bounded and isolated. As a result, Indians such as the Iroquois are more often than not depicted as communal, social, and circumspect victims whereas the Dutch are frequently portrayed as individualistic, antisocial, and profit-minded agents. According to these scholars, these cultural traits determined the nature of Indian–Dutch relations in New Netherland. Since the Dutch were a profit-minded and antisocial, it follows that they would only be interested in a commercial relationship with the Indians living in and around New Netherland and would otherwise maintain a social distance from their Indian neighbors. Scholars such as James Axtell, James Bradley, Jaap Jacobs, Willem Frijhoff, Charles Gehring, Tom Arne Midtrød, Benjamin Schmidt, Dean Snow, William Starna, and Kees-Jan Waterman have challenged these bounded depictions of Indian and Dutch cultures and thus enriched our understanding of Indian–Dutch relations.
It was the sweeping nineteenth-century narratives of John Fiske, Edmund O’Callaghan, and John Brodhead that provided many Euro-Americans with a mental framework from which to understand relations in New Netherland. In their work, Fiske, O’Callaghan, and Brodhead placed the Dutch colony of New Netherland in the