As Europeans went west, indigenous people travelled the other way

In recent decades indigenous people around the world have fought to rebuild cultures wrecked by colonialism, invoking a common phrase: “We are still here.” From protests against oil pipelines to bids to reclaim land, and from the revival of native cuisines to indigenous stories on screen, a renaissance is refuting the tired view that these cultures are vanishing.

According to Caroline Dodds Pennock’s absorbing account of indigenous peoples in 16th-century Europe, their roles in earlier history have been simplified or erased, too. “On Savage Shores” shatters the Eurocentric assumption that, half a millennium ago, people and ideas flowed in only one direction, from the old world to the “new”. Her study painstakingly reconstructs the first century of contact between colonial powers and the peoples of the Americas, documenting thousands of natives who travelled east, often involuntarily, to a continent they considered no less “savage” than the conquistadors had found their own.