Review of On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock

*On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe* by Caroline Dodds Pennock (2023). Published by Knopf.

My very first semester of graduate school, I took a seminar that was titled “Colonization, Decolonization, and Postcolonialism,” and it ended up becoming a pivotal course for me as a budding scholar.

It was taught through the lens of Native American history, and I found it absolutely fascinating to sit down and read in detail what native scholars were not only saying about the past, but what the future could look like.

For example, one scholar we read said it’s never truly decolonization if it’s done solely by the people who were already in charge.

So when I saw this book was a new release in 2023, I knew I wanted to pick up a copy immediately and get a sense of what it had to offer me historically.

I’d read all of these pieces about people coming to the New World, but hadn’t really read beyond what Pocahontas did (i.e. she went to England, which is what ended up killing her), but hadn’t the chance to read much more on Natives being sent to the Old World as slaves and indentured servants.

Let’s get into the review!

The story of Native Americans who were taken back to Europe, whether as prizes, slaves, or simply to show off to the royal courts.

As Dodds tells us in the introduction of the book, we often look at the history of the Americas by seeing how people came into the land. There’s an entire section of history where people call it a discovery, and that no one was living there. That’s a myth, as the Americas were full of vibrant cultures and people.

The land wasn’t barren at all. The land was taken away from them, and the conditions of living in war weakened them to the point where disease, violence, and a lack of resources wiped out a large swath of the Native American population.

Dobbs is looking to examine the other side of things. For example, a lot of the conquerers who came to the Americans ended up having children with Native American women, as there were no women really who came with them.

Thus a bunch of mixed race kids ended up becoming a thing, and then a resource for the Spanish, as these kids could be used to translate between the local languages and Spanish.

Not only did this happen, but a lot of Native Americans were taken from their native lands, families, and towards Europe. That’s the main focus of this book: the ones who were forcibly taken abroad. Some went to be shown off to the courts at the time, paraded around in the streets as these exotic people.

Others were forced into indentured servitude or became slaves, and their owners would put them on the boats and take them back to Europe, where they would work.

Disease got a lot of these natives. Unequipped for the conditions in Europe, they would succumb to disease early on in their lives, creating a gape in the historical records.

Dobbs acknowledges there aren’t a ton of their perspectives in the archives and present throughout history, thus justifying their approach as to why they used European sources throughout, but some of the more fascinating cases they look at include Natives taking people to court for their freedom in the mid-1500s.

That said, I cannot verify the lack of native resources, as I’m not a scholar on the subject.

Overall Thoughts

I think this is a really good text to consider in tandem with a bunch of other historical records and histories of natives in the period of cross-contact.

This book certainly isn’t perfect, but I thought that it was really easy to read and that together with the other resources I’ve read throughout the years, it was a good perspective to consider.

I hadn’t gotten ahold of a book that considered this side of the history, nor acknowledging it beyond a single paragraph, so I’m glad I read this text. But, again, I wouldn’t read it on its own because it only tells one side of the picture—you need multiple angles to get a holistic view.

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