Review Of Encounters At The Heart Of The World By Elizabeth Fenn

Elizabeth Fenn wrote Encounters at the Heart of the World because she wanted to tell the story of the Mandan people. Her goal was to tell a history story without focusing on telling it from a European perspective which typically focus on traditional settings such as the east coast when describing historical accounts of the United States. This book emphasizes the importance of the Mandan and how they were an important yet obscure part of American history. Fenn wants readers to know and care about the Mandan because it is a story about people, movement and interaction. In addition Fenn’s story challenges the perception of Indigenous people all over America and it allows the reader to get historical summary of important events while viewing

Interaction with the Europeans was not all positive as the contact brought diseases such as smallpox which Mandan were not immune to resulting in a devastating epidemic and as the pox ran its course in village after village at its peak entire towns descended into misery (159). The story also focuses on Lewis and Clark’s travels west and President Jefferson’s eagerness to establish relationships with Indigenous people and Fenn shows how Chief Sheheke’s visit to Washington was an important journey creating more dependence on the US. The Mandan’s eventually faced many hardships including rats, food shortages, the Sioux and another outbreak of

She decides to include a description of women’s work which is important because women’s work is frequently left out of historical accounts instead Fenn chooses to highlight how important their role was by explaining in great detail the type of work women did. Since Fenn decided to reference numerous short stories within each chapter she needed to show how she was going to how the different stories were relevant to her story and she achieved this through the use of effective titles. Fenn writes the story using both the past and the present so she can insert her own journey into the story the going back and forth helps keep the content fresh and exciting. While many times history books can become dull or overloaded with content Fenn’s personal experiences are well timed and offer lighter material. Finally even though Fenn focuses on the Mandan she is successfully able to incorporate key transformations that were occurring elsewhere in the United States and Europe. This helps give a better context to the time period but when she talks about other events she is able to relate it to the Mandan demonstrating that the focus is on telling how other events fit into Mandan history and not the other way