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WHY RESEARCH AMERICAN HISTORY IN EUROPEAN REPOSITORIES?
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As a
result of its experience in both European and domestic
repositories, NEART knows that numerous records of communications
(including maps, reports and even some sketches and drawings)
concerning Native American Tribes and their leaders, members,
speakers, customs, history, genealogy or relations with
other Tribes from the 1600's and 1700's (and even later)
exist only in European repositories and are not available
through local repositories. There are several reasons
why we believe this happened. Firstly, although the colonies
that generated these reports may have tried to keep copies,
necessarily the army of bureaucrats in the "civilized"
European capitols of the 1600's and 1700's could devote
far more time, resources and facilities to maintaining
a record of these reports than could be spent in the rugged
North American frontier cities (which were far more preoccupied
with survival and defense rather than on sorting, storing
and preserving scraps of paper). Secondly, in this period
many North American cities, were on the front lines of
a war among the French, British, Dutch and Spanish colonies,
whose borders were in a constant state of flux.If a city
or fort were overrun, any existing records weremost often
sent back to the conqueringcountry's capitol as captured
intelligence, making it impossible to maintain continuous
and complete local records in many areas until boundary
lines began to settle down toward the late 1700's. Thirdly,
also arguing in favor of more complete European records
is the self-interest and corruption of those who kept
records in the American and Canadian colonies. Local records
of maps, deeds, treaties and other records that conflicted
with a powerful bureaucrat's claim to authority or land
(or plans to take land), or that reflected negatively
on his ancestors or friends were often destroyed as were
damning correspondence or adverse legal decisions from
European superiors. In contrast all of these materials
were dumped into huge repositories in Europe by low level
bureaucrats who had no interest in altering the records
in favor of any of the parties involved. Finally, as with
any repositories, many of the North American records were
lost to inadvertent destruction, fire, water damage, decay
or other natural phenomenon. This may be true of some
European repositories as well, but by checking both a
more complete record is obtained.
