Rural Indigenousness: A History of Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks by Melissa Otis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rural Indigenousness: A History of Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks by Melissa Otis Elana Krischer (bio) Rural Indigenousness: A History of Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks By Melissa Otis. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018, 400 pages, 6" x 9". $39.95 paper. Rural Indigenousness, a part of Syracuse University Press's series The Iroquois and Their Neighbors, demonstrates that the Adirondacks were and are a Native homeland. Histories of the Adirondacks, typically centered on wilderness or conservation, ignore the region's Native past and present, while histories of Native peoples in North America often do not focus on rural, non-reservation communities. Today, many who live in the region are unaware of its Native past and present, mostly due to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century historians who wrote of the Adirondacks as a place where Native peoples only passed through to hunt. Otis corrects this erasure with her history of the Native peoples who lived and worked in the Adirondacks from the pre-colonial period to the twenty-first century. Otis argues that the Adirondacks were much more than a "hunting ground," and Native peoples in the region maintained their Indigenous identities through the centuries while they shaped the rural society that they were and are a part of (6). In the book's introduction, Otis describes the region she considers the Adirondacks, which stretches beyond the boundaries of the park itself. She also includes a thoughtful discussion of the terminology she uses to describe the variety of Native peoples there, which will be helpful for those unfamiliar with Native studies. In chapter one, Otis uses professional and amateur archaeological evidence and oral histories to examine the ways Indigenous peoples used the Adirondacks in the pre-colonial period. The Adirondacks were not just used for hunting, they were an Indigenous homeland that supported seasonal work including horticulture and mining, and held spiritual significance for a variety of Native nations. To highlight this point, Otis uses the idea of "location of exchange," which she defines as a "purposeful and occupied place where reciprocal acts occur, creating opportunities for entangled exchanges between people and the land" (32). Chapter two focuses on the middle ground nature of the Adirondacks during the nineteenth century. This period was marked by incidents of violence, but also mutual accommodation between the Native peoples who already lived in the borderland region, and the Native and Euro-American settlers who arrived after the American Revolution. Indigenous peoples continued to use the Adirondacks as hunting and trapping territory, but they also took on new forms of labor as the result of settler colonial expansion. Often, this was wage-labor centered on resource extraction. [End Page 155] Chapters three, four, and five focus on wilderness tourism, Native entrepreneurship, and the tourist industry. These chapters examine the ways Native peoples lived and worked in the Adirondacks in a variety of positions, like wilderness guides, store and restaurant owners, basket makers, and performers. Using a breadth of sources, from sporting narratives which captured Euro-American impressions of their Native wilderness guides, to material culture, Otis shows how Native peoples engaged with Euro-Americans and the landscape from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Otis notes that state removal and other policies attempted to displace much of the Haudenosaunee and Mahican populations, but her analysis of the continued Indigenous presence in the Adirondacks through the nineteenth century and beyond underlines the importance of the persistence of Native communities in the state. In a brief conclusion, Otis reminds readers of the purpose of her book, which she states is to decolonize history through research and teaching to stop "the settler colonial practice of vanishing" Native peoples from the narrative of North American history (256). This history of the families who made up the rural, nonreservation Native communities in the Adirondacks is such an important contribution to Native studies because, while Otis' work spans many centuries of settler encroachment, it is not a story of dispossession. For a region in the east, where Native peoples are often erased from or downplayed in history after the American Revolution, Otis has done the important work of showing that Native peoples...