ABSTRACT
Both American Indians and African Americans play central roles in the mainstream Recovery Narrative. Europeans took over and “improved” the Indians and their “natural” Edens by redeeming the eastern forests and western deserts. But blacks supplied much of the forced labor that enabled the Recovery project to proceed. The New World Eden became a colonized Eden with white Europeans at the center of the garden and Indians and blacks excluded or relegated to the periphery. In the process of rein-venting the American Eden, the storyline itself expanded and stretched in order to justify unequal power relations among the three groups. The mainstream Recovery Narrative privileged and promoted European Americans and legitimated their power over nonhuman nature and nonwhite peoples. As a consequence, minorities saw themselves as caught up in and resisting a narrative of decline. Looking more closely at Indian, black, and other immigrants’ cultural practices, self-autonomy and resistance, and at each group’s active use of sympathizers as allies
makes history more complex. It also indicates possibilities for partnerships among ethnic groups and the potential for a partnership ethic.
