An incredibly underrated book that all self-described “history buffs” should read. 

A historian does her best to reframe the Euro-centric “age of discovery” by focusing on the stories of indigenous Americans who traveled to Europe. 

Despite scant and/or biased source material, Dodds Pennock diligently highlights a variety of experiences & perspectives that we don’t hear about in school while also humanizing them. An appropriate Thanksgiving-time read.

This book tries to use surviving documentation and some oral histories to work out how Indigenous peoples in what is now the Americas saw Europe and Europeans. The documentation is so scant and so biased towards a European perspective that this is a bit like standing on your head and looking looking in a funhouse mirror, but given the constraints, I thought Pennock did a good job with it. I appreciate that she doesn't lean very hard on the "[X person] must have thought" formulation, which is more or less guaranteed to make me want to pitch a book at a wall. For the most part she lays out what records we have, and tries to contextualise them as best she can. I thought she did a great job at making characters come alive, and showing nuance in fraught situations. She's very clear about conflicting sources, and what they might reveal, as well as the unrliability and bias in most of her documents. (Both in the Europeans not understanding what was going on, and in the Indigenous documentation often being pitched for a Christian European audience.)

The most interesting take away for me was how many Indigenous people were kicking around Europe at any given time after 1492. Not just ambassadors at court, but generally out there living their lives. Another note for the next historical with an all-white cast.

The majority of the focus is on the Spanish Empire, with a bit of content from the English and French, and some mention of the Portuguese. I'd have liked a more even spread, but the Spanish records could've been more comprehensive, or the Spanish had more early contacts, or maybe that was just Pennock's area. 

Really great way of decolonizing the historical narrative through primary sources 

I learned so much! Accessible and easy to read, especially for an academic text. 

really good examination of what little information we have on this topic, with appropriate levels of conjecture where needed to humanize the people in question :-)