Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792

Abstract

This extensively documented and illustrated study by Susan Sleeper-Smith details American Indian women's central roles in the development of agriculture, the fur trade, community cultures, and, ultimately, military resistance in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ohio River valley region. She highlights the Potawatomi, Miami, Shawnee, Wea, and other Indian women who developed planting techniques so effective that surviving accounts contain descriptions of vast cornfields, beautiful cultivated orchards, and a healthy well-nourished people. From the marshlands and Black Swamp, they harvested roots and tubers to add flavor and nutrition to the region's diet. These rich food preserves supported a number of different ethnic groups who lived alongside each other peacefully with compromise, not war, guaranteeing mutual prosperity. Indeed, Sleeper-Smith argues, the pan-Indian world owed its creation not so much to Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa but to these women who provided the sustenance necessary to support well-populated communities. They also processed large quantities of pelts, as well as engaged in intermarriage necessary to the profitable fur trade, and demanded better manufactured cloth available from the Albany traders. Their rich embellishment of that cloth produced clothing that helped merge ethnic divisions into the development of an Indian identity.