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North of the Rio Grande the possibility of such influences are often ignored when not denied. To some extent this is understandable. After all, Indians were and are less numerous in the North. And most native societies in what is now the United States and Canada did not have written languages, monumental public architecture, or the wide-ranging aesthetic traditions of their neighbors to the south. Yet European colonists mingled with intact native cultures for some three centuries. Colonist Susanna Johnson described eighteenth-century New Hampshire, for example, as “such a mix…of savages and settlers, without established laws to govern them, that the state of society cannot easily be described.” During those centuries, Indians were greatly influenced—culturally, technologically, intellectually—by colonists. It seems implausible that the exchange could have been entirely one-way—that the natives have had little or no long-lasting impact on the newcomers. At the least the claim is something to be demonstrated rather than assumed.

Scholars have acknowledged such borrowings as moccasins, maize, and military tactics, such as the Indian-style guerrilla skirmishes with which the rebellious colonists bedeviled British soldiers. (“In this country,” Gen. John Forbes argued in 1758, “wee must comply and learn the Art of Warr, from Enemy Indians.”) With such adaptive changes, as the historian James Axtell has called them, Europeans employed Indian technology and tactics to achieve their goals. But they did not change how they viewed themselves or the world. According to an influential essay Axtell published in 1981, the most important role Indians played in the evolution of the United States was as “military foes and cultural foes”—to be the “otherness” that colonists reacted against. “The whole colonial experience of trying to solve a related series of ‘Indian problems’ had much to do with giving the colonists an identity indissolubly linked to America,” he wrote. Collectively recoiling from the native population of the Americas, Europeans learned how to become a new version of themselves.

Here, though, most historians have stopped. They have seen the Algonkian- and Iroquoian-speaking societies they encountered in the Northeast as too different from British societies to have exerted lasting changes on them. How could these hierarchical, acquisitive, market-oriented, monotheistic, ethnocentric newcomers have absorbed ideas and customs from the egalitarian, reciprocal, noncapitalistic, pantheistic, ethnocentric natives? My suggestion that the Haudenosaunee could have had an impact on the American character is “naïve,” according to Alan Taylor, because it “minimizes the cultural divide separating consensual natives from coercive colonists.” Perhaps so, but then skeptics must explain how the cultural divide between Indians and Spaniards, who did deeply influence each other, could have been so much smaller.

(The historian Francis Jennings has wondered how “Iroquois propagandists,” as he calls them, can cite Benjamin Franklin’s words about Indians, as I did, given his oft-expressed “contempt for ‘ignorant Savages.’…But people believe what they want to believe in the face of logic and evidence.” The argument is baffling; it is like claiming that African-Americans had no impact on European-American culture, because the latter was racist and systematically oppressed the former.)

To Europeans, Indians were living demonstrations of wholly novel ways of being human—exemplary cases that were mulled over, though rarely understood completely, by countless Europeans. Colonists and stay-at-homes, intellectuals and commoners, all struggled to understand, according to the sociologist-historian Denys Delâge, of Laval University, in Québec, “the very existence of these relatively egalitarian societies, so different in their structure and social relationships than those of Europe.” Montaigne, Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine