American Pentimento : The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches

Abstract

American Pentimento traces the history of colonization and exploitation in the Americas coming to demonstrate how contemporary native struggles are decisively limited by embedded cultural assumptions this history has incorporated into the very constitution of the Americas. As Seed writes, "the most enduring popular images of native Americans originated in common economic ambition shared by Anglo-Saxon or Iberian colonizers." This book focuses on the European colonies whose rules for acquiring riches have most profoundly influenced the present-day options of most natives of the Americas: England, Spain, and Portugal. Seed brings her argument into the present by warning of the continuity in economic motives between our colonial past and our national present. Throughout the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand today, native communities's rights to wealth are governed by a host of modern regulations that seem to have deleted traces of the earlier colonial rules. But underneath more recently imposed standards can often be seen traces of earlier ones.