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Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race by Nancy Shoemaker (Hardback, 2015)

In the nineteenth century, nearly all Native American men living along the southern New England coast made their living traveling the world's oceans on whaleships. Many were career whalemen, spending twenty years or more at sea. Their labor invigorated ecomically depressed reservations with vital income and led to complex and surprising connections with other Indigeus peoples, from the islands of the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean. At home, aboard ship, or around the world, Native American seafarers found themselves in a variety of situations, each with distinct racial expectations about who was Indian and how Indians behaved. Treated by their white neighbors as degraded dependents incapable of taking care of themselves, Native New Englanders nevertheless rose to positions of command at sea. They thereby complicated myths of exploration and expansion that depicted cultural encounters as the meeting of two peoples, whites and Indians. Highlighting the shifting racial ideologies that shaped the lives of these whalemen, Nancy Shoemaker shows how the category of Indian was as fluid as the whalemen were mobile.

Place of Publication
Chapel Hill
Content Note
11 Halftones, 3 Maps, 4 Tables
Author Biography
Nancy Shoemaker Is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, USA.
Date of Publication
01/04/2015
Country of Publication
United States
Genre
Regional History

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