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LAURA M. Stevens. The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. 264.
In The Poor Indians Laura Stevens examines the ways in which the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility informed a diverse array of Protestant missionary writings about Native Americans during the years between the English Civil War and the American Revolution. In doing so, she provides a nuanced analysis of the role missionary activity and related notions of shared compassion played in helping to create transatlantic modes of English and British national identity. This is not a book about Native Americans; rather, as its title indicates, it is about English and British perceptions of Indians and the ways in which indigenous people were depicted in missionary discourses. And yet, despite -or rather because of-its primary focus on English and British cultural contexts, The Poor Indians sheds important light on the crucial ways in which the rhetoric of sensibility informed colonial practices that affected indigenous peoples themselves.
The book begins with an analysis of key scenes from Defoe's Life and Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, scenes which Stevens uses to introduce her book's key themes and concerns in a compact and engaging manner. Examining the castaway Crusoe's change of heart in the wake of his original visceral desire to kill a group of Caribe Indians he stereotypes as monstrous cannibals, Stevens juxtaposes Defoe's depiction of Indian passion with his portrayal of Crusoe's ultimate Christian compassion. The shift in Crusoe's perspective turns not only on a binary opposition between the Caribes' supposed savagery and his own ostensible civility, but also on related questions of nationalism and religious doctrine: Defoe's protagonist needs to distinguish his own behavior from that of the Spanish Catholic conquistadores who arrived in the New World before him. Wishing to become a pious instrument of God's will, Crusoe not only condescends to pity the godless Caribes but also takes it upon himself to convert the heathen Friday to Protestant Christianity. Sublimating its protagonist's "hatred and . . . fear" of the indigenous Other into "heroic violence and evangelical fervor," Robinson Crusoe provides an early example of "an imperial rhetoric built on the claims of compassion" (pp. 2-3). Investigating this rhetoric in a diverse...