BOOK REVIEW : The <i> Other </i> Side of the American Conquest : STOLEN CONTINENTS; The Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492, <i> by Ronald Wright</i> , Houghton Mifflin, $22.95; 399 pages

“For five centuries, we have listened only to the history of the winner,” warns Ronald Wright in “Stolen Continents,” a fiercely revisionist history of what we arrogantly call the New World. “It is time to hear the other side of the story.”

Wright reminds us that the native peoples of the Americas--including the Aztecs of what is now Mexico, the Mayas of Guatemala and Yucatan, the Incas of Peru, the Cherokees of the Southern United States and the Iroquois of the Great Lakes--possessed art, science, philosophy, statecraft and technology of a very high order long before the conquistadors arrived.

“It is a mistake to think of them as curious fossils,” Wright insists.

Resistance is the real theme of Wright’s counter-history. Three centuries of European conquest and colonization failed to extinguish the native civilization of the Americas, according to Wright, and he insists that a cultural and political renaissance is taking place. From the Inca warriors to the Shining Path guerrillas of our own times, Wright sees an unbroken thread of resistance.

It’s Wright’s self-appointed mission to rescue the conquered peoples and their culture from the dustbin of history and to reveal to us their “fine, philosophical and poetic side.” He goes about his task with white-hot passion, and the result is a counter-history that challenges all of our comfortable assumptions about the making of the Americas in the West’s image.

Wright dismisses as a “crackpot idea,” for example, our fanciful notion that natives idolized the European explorers as “great white gods.” “Far from mistaking the strangers for gods,” he writes of the first Mayas to come across a party of Spaniards, they blithely “ordered them to stand aside.”

Wright uses frequent analogies to the “higher” civilizations of East and West to explain the beliefs of American Indians. The mythical god-hero Quetzalcoatal was “a once and future king, an Arthur or a Barbarossa.” The earliest twin cities of the Aztecs were “like Westminster and London,” and Aztec religion “was closer to Hinduism.” And when the Aztecs resisted their Spanish conquerors, “they fought tenaciously, block by block, week after week, like Berliners at the end of the Second World War.”

Wright’s rhetorical technique, I suppose, is intended to open up the world of these ancient peoples by linking it to more familiar ideas and places. But there’s a subtle intellectual ploy at work: Wright refuses to allow us to regard the native cultures of the Americas as mere oddities, and he insists on approaching Aztecs and Athenians, Mayas and Moguls, Cherokees and Chinese as cultural equivalents.

The prevailing tone in “Stolen Continents” is anger and despair over the spoilage of the New World by its “discoverers,” who laid waste to the land even as they looted its natural resources.

And spoilage, Wright reminds us, extended to whole peoples and cultures. The American Indians who recorded their history in symbolic beadwork designs suffered an especially cruel fate: “These needed oral commentary, and whenever the old died en masse from war and plague, it was as if a library had burned.”

But Wright has managed to resurrect the fragments of these ravaged cultures. The ancient bards and chroniclers of Central and South America produced a written history that survived the best efforts of the conquerors to obliterate it.

Of the conquistadors’ gold fever, an Aztec chronicler observed: “They snatched up the gold like monkeys. . . . They hungered for that gold like pigs.” And an ancient lament of the Aztecs strikes a surprisingly modern chord: “The smoke rises; the fog is spreading . . . / Weep, my friends, / Know that with these disasters / We have lost the Mexican nation.”

Wright predicts a revival of the conquered peoples, and the last third of “Stolen Continents” begins to read like a political manifesto. But to dismiss Wright’s book as merely “politically correct” is not only a disservice to his apparent sincerity, but it misses the point of “Stolen Continents,” which is a genuinely radical call for the resurgence of nations and peoples we thought to be dead and gone.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Aquamarine” by Carol Anshaw (Houghton Mifflin).