Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith Margaret Noodin (bio) Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 susan sleeper-smith Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018 348 pp. The truth about Indigenous history is often masked by accounts of exploration, discovery, conquest, and settlement instead of endurance, maintenance, collaboration, and immigrants. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest offers a way to balance the two antithetical concepts of prosperous Indigenous civilization and American manifest conquest by weaving a new network of perspectives including material and oral sources contextualized by a holistic review of facts. Using this multifaceted approach, Sleeper-Smith accurately summarizes the cataclysmic change endured by Indigenous people during the formation of United States. Although the book centers on tradeswomen of the Ohio River valley during the eighteenth century, the lessons of interdisciplinary inquiry, examination of sustainable social infrastructure and the merit of writing history from all angles could be applied globally across many time periods. As we are still able to say in Anishinaabemowin today: aabdeg gikendamang debwemigak gaa-ezhiwebag (it is important to know the truth of what happened). Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest continues the story Sleeper-Smith began in Indian Women and French Men. In it she blends histories of cultures, military campaigns, trade economics, leadership, gender roles, archeology, geology, ethnobotany, agriculture, household [End Page 899] artifacts, and fiber arts to add dimension to known biographies and make connections between nations. The book reminds readers: "Indians were more than minor obstacles to western expansion. They constituted a viable alternative to it—an alternative lost for centuries under the ashes of burnt crops, charred villages, and the masculine monuments of a destiny made manifest only by amnesia and self-interest" (12). She demonstrates how the complex cosmopolitan exchange of fur and goods stretching from the Atlantic to the interior of the continent via the chain of Great Lakes and interconnected rivers was the primary barrier to the expansion of the United States after the revolutionary declaration of its independence. While previous histories have focused on the journals and records of explorers, traders, translators, and soldiers, Sleeper-Smith traces the social networks of kinship, ceremony, and place-based stewardship that supported extensive healthy communities for centuries. She notes where events and exchanges were tainted by misunderstanding and cultural incompetence, and she reassesses some of the destructive biases of earlier colonial and fur trade literature. One of the contributions she makes to the field is accurate representation of the cultural diversity of the time. She includes nations who functioned across vast diasporas, nations in the process of forming new inter-tribal alliances, nations that are still present in the same location today and nations that have been fractured, relocated, and in some cases renamed. Her careful attention to political identity highlights the intentional obfuscation of the early federal negotiators, which continues to shape most citizens' understanding of the history of America today. For example, in 1789 the United States government gave the Wyandot six thousand dollars and the Iroquois three thousand dollars to gain title of Miami and Shawnee lands (228). The descendants of these nations and those living in Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois today should know the history of the space they now call home. The land and its long-standing connection to Indigenous communities, which is a relationship still protected by women, is the focus of the book. Plantings at the confluence of rivers, cultivation of prairies to feed seasonal flocks and herds, homes located outside flood zones, no-till practices, natural irrigation, and organic fertilization were only a few of the signs Indigenous women viewed the surrounding landscape as an equal animate partner in a sustainable ecosystem. For the Indigenous women [End Page 900] living along the Ohio River's 981 miles of banks in the 1700s, the value of agriculture and land stewardship was not merely the creation of commodities; it was a system of communication, transportation, and the assurance of resilience in the face of climate change, disease, and military assault. "Local knowledge rendered these...