Indigenous Polities Research Articles

Indigenous war captives and mobility-oriented punishments: An Atlantic-Mediterranean world perspective

ABSTRACT This study explores two well-known case studies involving the removal of Indigenous war captives from their places of origin to fortifications or to Mediterranean galley ships to do forced labor. I draw on known scholarship on Indigenous war captives in New England and New France during the seventeenth century to consider the local conditions in Europe and North America that created the possibility for the dispersal of captives. Europeans moved Indigenous captives for various reasons and responded to the actions and demands of Indigenous polities, particularly during times of warfare or raiding. Rather than placing Indigenous history into European power frameworks, I focus on how mobility-oriented punishments are simultaneously connected to events in interior continental Indigenous and the European mainland. By doing so, I offer a critique of the settler colonial paradigm.

Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill

Reviewed by: Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill Angela Pulley Hudson Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818. By James L. Hill. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 323 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. In his influential essay "Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations," historian Brian DeLay observes that despite some important calls for correction, American Indian peoples have largely fallen "outside the professional mandate for diplomatic history."1 Building on an earlier argument by historian Arthur N. Gilbert, DeLay notes that the categorization of Native peoples as "legal oddities" since at least the mid-nineteenth century has fueled the field's oversight and is itself largely a consequence of colonialism and imperialism.2 Moreover, the continued erasure of Indigenous people from American diplomatic history depends on scholarly assumptions that Native peoples had no "foreign policy" and were both "disconnected from" and "irrelevant to … international events."3 Yet, as DeLay points out and as decades of work within the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies have demonstrated, there is a rich source base providing evidence to the contrary.4 Among the many contributions of James L. Hill's monograph, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818, its forceful call for greater incorporation of southeastern Indians into the diplomatic history of the Atlantic world is topmost. Hill's study addresses the intersecting themes of diplomacy, trade, and sovereignty in the Creek confederacy during the tumultuous period between the end of the Seven Years' War and the end of the First Seminole War, with an emphasis on the Chattahoochee and Flint River regions in present-day Georgia and Florida. But both his subjects and his source material range much further as he takes readers from Havana to Halifax, from Saint Augustine to Quebec, and from Tallahassee to London. Rather than appearing disconnected from or irrelevant to international relations—per DeLay's indictment of much foreign relations history—Creek, Seminole, and [End Page 408] Miccosukee figures, as Hill's careful analysis demonstrates, used maritime voyages, overland travel, and shrewd diplomatic dealings to advance their aims and protect their autonomy. Though the overall success of their actions was undoubtedly modest, Creek Internationalism lays bare the importance and impact of their efforts. It thus effectively answers DeLay's call for scholarship that undertakes "excavations of the struggle between indigenous polities, settlers, and states for practical control over space" and engages with "Indian polities and individuals as historical actors, rather than mere objects of state and settler aggression."5 Creek Internationalism argues that the two competing movements that emerged in the late eighteenth-century Creek world—one pushing for centralization (a nascent Creek nation) and one striving to protect and even enlarge town (talwa or talofa) autonomy and power—both engaged in inter/intranational diplomacy to achieve their aims. This broad assertion contributes to a long-standing discussion (some call it a debate) in Creek historiography: the degree to which the term nation appropriately describes what the Creek confederacy was or what mid-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century Creek people wanted it to be. Scholars such as Steven C. Hahn, Joshua Piker, and Andrew K. Frank, among others, have produced thoughtful analyses around the question of Creek nationhood, as have a new generation of historians including Bryan C. Rindfleisch and Steven J. Peach.6 But consensus is elusive. And Hill's study does not move us any closer to resolution. To be fair, that is not his goal; instead, he takes that fundamental tension as a given and convincingly uses it as the foundation for his exploration of how foreign relations informed the internal debate in Creek country to a degree not fully recognized in extant literature. Through six more or less chronological chapters, Hill examines key episodes in which both Creek nationalists (those advocating some level of centralization) and Creek localists (those working on behalf of a distinct talwa or group of talwas) deployed "internationalism" (15), which he defines as a strategy designed "to secure recognition that their communities possessed sovereign rights" (15–16) on par with nation-states. Creek Internationalism makes two significant...

From Borderlands to the Sea: Recent Studies of Indigenous Atlantic Travellers

AbstractThe dominions, political strategies, and diverse lifeways of Indigenous peoples in the early modern Atlantic world have been treated generally as rural and terrestrial—ending at the shore—while European supremacy over the high seas has been taken for granted. These conceptual assumptions have extended into methodological approaches to encounters between Indigenous polities and European empires that emphasize borderlands, frontiers, and middle (or native) grounds. Four recent monographs depart from such framings by focusing on Indigenous actions in cities such as Lima, Madrid, and London, travel across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and exertions of naval supremacy on the sea. In doing so, they provide new vantage points for reconsidering the meanings of freedom and slavery, diplomacy, trans-oceanic legal networks, and piracy.

Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796 by Joshua S. Haynes

Reviewed by: Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796 by Joshua S. Haynes Taylor McGaughy Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796. By Joshua S. Haynes. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. 310 pp. $29.95. ISBN 9–780–8203–6174–1. Historians of the colonial South have spent decades poring over treaty texts, ethnographic observations, and archeological inventories attempting to explain the structure and nature of the region’s indigenous polities. Sixty years ago, the historiographic consensus read much like eighteenth-century European sources in that it asserted that seminal chiefs largely guided affairs of state but recognized that these polities were at core loosely connected confederacies. Over the past thirty years, historians upended these notions by emphasizing varied loci of political power. Some have demonstrated how the hierarchical, stratified polities of the Mississippian era segued into decentralized, egalitarian societies after contact that veered again towards consolidation in the face of an expansive early American republic, and others respectively centered clans, towns, and regional blocs as the keys to understanding Native American politics. Still others recast confederacies as budding nations, with identities crystalizing and collective action materializing in response to external pressures. Patrolling the Border represents a novel, critical contribution to this long-running discourse on indigenous state-hood. Haynes presents late-eighteenth-century Creek raiding as a mechanism of policy enforcement which arose at the town level as a reaction to Georgians’ disregard for established boundaries. Though local in origin, these border patrols gradually evolved into a standard polity-wide practice, a common foreign policy to counter encroachment which facilitated coalescence across Creek society. Haynes’s groundbreaking research thus casts these border patrols as an utterly convincing, much-needed bridge between the decentralized network of autonomous towns and villages of the mid-eighteenth century and an early-nineteenth-century National Council which issued laws and directives binding on all Creeks. Thorough analysis underpins Haynes’s conclusions about the border patrols; he applies quantitative and geographic methodology [End Page 332] to nearly one thousand raids that occurred over a thirty-year span to deduce some central truths. Mapping the incidents reveals that the majority of them (seventy-six percent) occurred in a long, narrow tract known as the Oconee Strip. Events which followed the land cessions of the late British colonial period are better explained by the geographic concentration of the raiding; the 1773 New Purchase commenced Georgia’s push into this territory, and a series of treaties outlined the terms and limits of occupancy, which a barrage of squatters and backcountry settlers always violated. The White-Sherrill murders, an episode depicted by previous historians as an isolated, violent incident orchestrated by renegades dissatisfied with the cession, is repositioned by Haynes as both the manifestation of widely held sentiments that the Georgians had transgressed the agreed-upon boundary and the commencement of decades worth of raiding aimed at protecting invaluable hunting lands along the Oconee. Though thepatrols combed the entire Creek periphery, targeting encroachment in the Tensaw District near Mobile, the Franklin settlements of present-day northeastern Tennessee, and the vicinity of the St. Mary’s River along the present-day border of Georgia and Florida, the sheer volume of raids in the Oconee district reinforce Haynes’s primary contention: that Georgia represented the clearest danger to Creek territorial sovereignty and that Oconee raiding embodied a deliberate policy embraced by a coalescing indigenous nation to counter that threat. Quantitative consideration of the raids demonstrates their temporal concentration. Haynes discovers that the patrols spiked in the direct aftermath of controversial treaties consented to by rump Creek headmen. These treaties ceded lands on the east bank of the Oconee to Georgia (and frequently included concessions allowing Creeks hunting privileges on the Georgia side), but were approved by groups of chiefs that fell short of representing collective Creek will. Dissatisfaction with these agreements and the demographic surge engulfing the lands in question prompted raids emanating from many towns aimed at protecting Creek territorial integrity. Haynes’s juxtaposition of the raiding spikes alongside the treaties clarifies the [End Page 333] differences of opinion which existed across time throughout Creek nation; some...

The Border Crossed Us: Enhancing Indigenous International Mobility Rights

ABSTRACT In North America, a major impediment to Indigenous sovereignty and treaty rights to free movement involves the reticence of the Canadian government on the U.S.-Canada border, and the U.S. government on the U.S.-Mexico border, to allow Indigenous people the right to travel to live and work on both sides of a frontier imposed by settler states. In this article, I argue for enhanced mobility rights for all members of Indigenous polities in North America across the borders that divide their ancestral homelands, with the option to acquire citizenship in each country that has jurisdiction over their nation’s territory. This policy intervention would facilitate interaction, cultural exchange, and trade across militarized frontiers. Enhanced mobility rights across settler state borders for Indigenous peoples would serve as a form of rectification for past treatment that coercively constituted the identities of the affected tribes, without forcing them to accept another settler state’s sovereignty claims.

Governance Strategies in Precolonial Central Mexico

Among the Indigenous polities of precolonial Mesoamerica, the Aztec empire, headed by a confederation of three city-states, was the largest recorded and remains the best understood, due to its chronicling in Spanish and Nahuatl texts following the Spanish-Aztec war and colonial transformation to New Spain. Yet its political organization is routinely mischaracterized in popular media, and lesser-known contemporaries and predecessors in central Mexico exhibit variability in governing strategies over time and space of interest to comparatively oriented scholars of premodern polities. Common themes in governance tended to draw from certain socio-technological realities and shared ontologies of religion and governing ideologies. Points of divergence can be seen in the particular entanglements between political economies and the settings and scales of collective action. In this paper, I review how governance varied synchronically and diachronically in central Mexico across these axes, and especially in relation to resource dilemmas, fiscal financing, the relative strength of corporate groups versus patron-client networks, and how rulership was legitimated.

Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson

Reviewed by: Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution by Mark R. Anderson Loren Michael Mortimer (bio) Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution mark r. anderson University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 306 pp. At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, the Continental Army prepared to invade Canada, and the British military government took concurrent measures to defend the province. Patriot and Loyalist leaders alike recognized the strategic importance of the Indigenous confederation known as the Seven Nations of Canada. Composed of eight sovereign Native American towns along the upper St. Lawrence River, these multiethnic communities guarded key river confluences connecting Canada to the rebellious Anglo-American settler colonies to the south. In the military contest for Canada, the Seven Nations could tip the balance of power in favor of the Patriots or the Crown. Likewise, the Seven Nations feared the despoliation of their lands amid the crossfire of a civil [End Page 599] war within the British Empire. As historian Mark R. Anderson shows in Down the Warpath to the Cedars, the Seven Nations proved decisive in the defeat of the Continental Army at the Battle of the Cedars in late May 1776. Although historians on both sides of the US-Canada border have largely overlooked or intentionally disremembered the significance of the Cedars, Anderson offers a timely intervention recovering histories of Indigenous autonomy and racialized violence during the American Revolution, as well as the affair's aftermaths in Native American council houses, Patriot assemblies, and imperial corridors of power. In the summer of 1775, the Seven Nations of Canada had thrived in proximity to European settler population centers along the St. Lawrence River for more than a century. Although the Seven Nations had intimately entangled connections of trade and kinship with the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois, it remained a politically autonomous Indigenous polity. The Seven Nations traced their origins to Catholic converts who relocated to Francophone mission communities during the late seventeenth century. Between 1701 and 1754, these mission towns gradually coalesced into a confederation rooted in shared connections to the St. Lawrence River, Catholicism, extended family networks, and mutual defense. Although steadfast allies to the French before 1759, each constituent community maintained their sovereignty and distinctive cultures. The Seven Nations Council convened at Kahnawake, the largest town with a decidedly Mohawk-Iroquois demographic composition. But this diverse confederation included Hurons from Wendake, the Wabanaki peoples from Odanak and Wolinâk, Mohawks and Nipissings from Kanesatake, Mohawks from Akwesasne, and Oneidas and Onondagas from Oswegatchie. With careful attention to multidimensional Indigenous politics at the confederation, village, and factional levels, Anderson argues that Native Americans created a "strategic environment" at the Battle of the Cedars that aligns with Ojibwe historian Michael Witgen's concept of an "infinity of nations" (1). Indeed, the framework of an "infinity of nations" proves apposite for this study, particularly as political affiliations remained fluid for colonists and Indigenous peoples alike during the early phases of the conflict. Despite the military invasion of their homelands during the American Revolution, the Seven Nations of Canada largely avoided the internecine warfare and dispossession endured by larger and better-known Indigenous polities like the Six Nations Haudenosaunee. Yet the author notes that in "contrast to the reasonably well developed Six Nations Revolutionary War [End Page 600] narrative, the Seven Nations of Canada lack significant historical treatment for the era. The Cedars and its 1775 precedents clearly reveal the complexity of Laurentian Indian politics" (155). While Anderson observed that the Seven Nations "were far from a unified polity" (4), Native American emphasis on local autonomy and factional consensus within councils rendered their confederation no more or less united than the Six Nations or the ad hoc Patriot delegations at the Continental Congress during the summer of 1775. Given Patriot sentiments among Anglo-American colonists in Montreal as well as disaffection with British rule by factions within the Seven Nations, Canada's participation in the rebellion remained an open political question for British officials, Loyalists, Patriots, and Native Americans alike. To make sense of an ethnic and political milieu that defied nationality or a strictly Patriot vs...

Victory for all, administration for some: an examination of differences in the impact of Indigenous jurisdictional expansion in Oklahoma

Indigenous polities often face the consequences of decisions that emerge from processes outside of their control. The U.S. Supreme Court decision on McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020, which recognized nearly a third of the state of Oklahoma as potentially within the jurisdiction of five Native American tribes, is one such example. The lawsuit generating this decision was a legal appeal by an individual – not a tribe – and may have implications that include recognizing tribal jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters throughout much of the state. The decision was celebrated by tribes and those advocating for greater recognition of their territorial authority. Yet, for tribal leaders and other practitioners of Indigenous self-determination, the decision potentially shifts major administrative burdens to resource-limited tribes. In an attempt to mitigate the significant costs of administering this territory, these tribes have initiated negotiations with the state of Oklahoma and local municipalities to clarify jurisdiction and coordinate administrative responsibilities. Outrage over these negotiations came from mostly academics and activists who perceived negotiations as a rejection of greater jurisdictional sovereignty. This paper uses the McGirt decision as a point of entry to explore differences in how practitioners and academics grounded in Indigenous politics understand the impact of policy shifts even when they further mutually desired commitments.

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s

Although tightly focused on a short time span of just a decade, this provocative collection of essays makes bold and refreshingly innovative claims about the historical nature of sovereignty, the nation-state, and modern political identity in North America. Readers of HAHR will be familiar with the calls to include Mexico and Latin America in a continental and hemispheric framework for the historiography of the Age of Revolution and state formation. However, this volume refocuses on the political crises, civil wars (or lack thereof in Canada), and new social contracts emerging in the 1860s by reconfiguring perspectives away from the Atlantic and toward the interior and Pacific landscapes that dominated the North American continent. As the dean of nineteenth-century US history, Steven Hahn, writes in the collection's first essay, “an ‘inside out’ and ‘southside north’ perspective may also allow us to see . . . patterns of development most important to nineteenth-century American capitalism” (p. 33).Perhaps more than those for other edited volumes of essays, the introduction for Remaking North American Sovereignty also takes on the weighty theoretical and historical questions: What is sovereignty? What is the state? What is the nation? Frank Towers importantly presents his working definitions of these concepts, which are more familiarly debated in scholarship on the Age of Revolution and less so in scholarship on the mid to late nineteenth century. This volume, then, asks “how . . . did new understandings of national identity and new definitions of citizenship come to pass in the 1860s and 70s, and in what ways did these transformations . . . cross political boundaries?” (p. 13). The introduction alone gives much food for thought about adopting a more capacious temporal and spatial understanding of modern state formation.The editors neatly divide the book into three sections, titled “Making Nations,” “Indigenous Polities,” and “The Complications of the Market.” Part 1 includes work by scholars Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijangos y González, and Robert Bonner. Collectively, these essays tackle this seminal decade “from the inside out,” exploring the overlapping influences and synchronous actions of Mexican, Canadian, and US national consolidation projects amid civil wars, regional conflict, and, in the case of Canada's Confederation, efforts to maintain ties to the “mother country.” As Mijangos y González importantly points out, these “parallel trajectories. . . . responded to global trends and above all to regional dynamics that explain the simultaneous nature” of national consolidation (p. 75).Containing the work of Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante, part 2 focuses on Indigenous states. These authors build on recent efforts by scholars of Native North America to insert into the existing, teleological national histories of Canada, Mexico, and the US Native polities the powerful Great Plains nations, who “imagined territory as a permeable space with porous borders that permitted mobility, and as a source of resources to be appropriated” (p. 153). Highlighting the dynamic political and economic forces emanating out of the vast interior plains, these essays seek to elevate Indigenous actions and calculations to the diplomatic level, thus answering a call made most forcefully by historian Brian DeLay.Focusing on the expansion of capitalism and its role in modern state formation, the final section includes prominent scholars who have pioneered on this topic: Christopher Clark, Mary P. Ryan, and Benjamin H. Johnson. Each essay focuses closely on the ways that the local conditions on the ground—whether the “family farms” identified by Clark, the local municipalities such as San Francisco detailed by Ryan, or the borderland communities of northwest Mexico analyzed by Johnson—shifted in response to the momentous progress of political and economic consolidation (p. 195).The other refreshing aspect of this volume is its provocative conclusion (not always included in such edited works) prodding the reader to fully embrace a continental perspective both spatially and temporally. Indeed, one can push this further (as some have) to take a more hemispheric perspective, revealing the tug of Latin America on its Northern neighbors. Returning to Steven Hahn is instructive: “looking further to the inside and the south, we may even see that it was in the great Mexican Revolution—mostly ignored by scholars of the United States—that the long nineteenth century first gave way to the twentieth” (p. 33).

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Evan C. Rothera Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 228. Notes, index.) Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers have assembled a collection of essays that analyze North American state-making in the 1860s by employing a continental perspective "that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach to this period" (1). As Towers helpfully explains, people typically associate sovereignty with government power and define it as "a right to decide and therefore to rule" (2). However, some scholars have cautioned against ascribing tidy definitions to the term. Moreover, many definitions of sovereignty have roots in the nineteenth century. Thus, this volume is as much about multifarious understandings of sovereignty as about how people contested and remade sovereignty and the relationships between nations and empires. Part I, "Making Nations," contains chapters by Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijongos y González, and Robert Bonner. Hahn analyzes the United States from the "inside out" and the "southside north" to illustrate "connections that have long been difficult to conceive" (32). Smith argues that ideas about racial and ethnic hierarchies played a critical role in the creation of the Canadian Confederation. Mexico and the United States experienced constitutional revolution, Mijongos y González observes, whereas Canada followed a path of constitutional gradualism, but despite the divergent paths, all three nations arrived at a similar endpoint. Bonner notes the importance of images to sovereignty and examines how mass-circulated images "distilled and shaped popular engagement with capital cities" (80). Part II, "Indigenous Polities," features chapters by Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante. Dinwoodie focuses on Eastern Cherokees and Bayou Lacombe Choctaws to reveal how Indigenous communities in the U.S. Southeast "fought to sustain a world of contested and [End Page 351] persistent sovereignties" (122). Hall analyzes treaty-making between the Blackfoot and U.S. and Canadian authorities. Blackfoot leaders attempted to make treaties that preserved their own sovereignty as they faced similar expansionist states on both sides of the border. Terrazas y Basante observes that Mexicans, U.S. settlers, and Indigenous people understood sovereignty, territory, and free transit in different ways and illustrates how Mexicans saw Indian raids as a threat to the nation's sovereignty. Part III, "The Complications of the Market," includes chapters by Christopher Clark, Benjamin H. Johnson, and Mary P. Ryan. Clark explores the relationship between ideas about the role of land and sovereignty and illustrates how farm populations shaped state power and market forces. Johnson focuses on Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to narrate national histories from border areas. Defeat in the Cortina War and the North-West Rebellion replaced "longstanding aspirations for autonomy and self-determination" among ethnic Mexicans and Métis with "violent incorporation into national communities" (215). Ryan concludes by analyzing San Francisco, California, to demonstrate how cities were key political players. Anyone interested in Texas and the Southwest will particularly enjoy Terrazas y Basante and Johnson's chapters. In many respects, Remaking North American Sovereignty is truly a transnational volume. The chapters began as conference papers at a conference held in Canada. The resulting volume features contributions by scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Mexico that focus on Mexico, the United States, and Canada. However, the definition of North America in this volume—encompassing the three aforementioned nations—is too narrow. Weaving the nations of the Caribbean and Central America into this volume would have allowed the contributors to say even more about sovereignty and nation-states. This point aside, the contributors illustrate the richness of their topics and provide models for other scholars interested in exploring sovereignty and nation-states in the nineteenth-century world. These lively essays will appeal to a general as much as a scholarly audience and many would make excellent additions to graduate seminars. Evan C. Rothera The University of Texas at Dallas Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Both the Forest and the Trees: In the Wilderness with the Pilgrims

Both the Forest and the Trees: In the Wilderness with the Pilgrims Ann Marie Plane (bio) John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. x + 447. Maps, illustrations, notes and index. $30.00. John G. Turner begins his new book on Plymouth Colony by invoking two popular narratives. In the first (which “Americans learn . . . when they are children”), key elements combine: “a ship, a compact, a rock, a winter of death and disease, a harvest, and a Thanksgiving turkey meal” to make “a heartwarming story about two peoples feasting together instead of fighting each other” (p. 1). The second narrative offers “an alternative, more dispiriting history.” Here, “the Pilgrims made a treaty and alliance with the Indians, then took their land and killed or enslaved those who resisted.” In this darker version, “Late November is a time for mourning, not a time for giving thanks” (p. 1). Turner introduces each tale as a straw man; each is based on beliefs that the author promises to complicate and deepen. And in the 360-plus pages that follow, Turner weaves together a capacious synthesis that incorporates scholarship from a wide range of eras and approaches, rereading primary sources and using key anecdotes to flesh out his tale. This book focuses on the Christian liberty sought out by English colonists in Plymouth and the ways their insistence on such freedoms led them to deny others (dissenters, political dissidents, and Indigenous peoples) various forms of liberty. There is much to admire in this synthesis of Plymouth Colony’s history; in the end, though, Turner’s narrative would have benefitted from greater precision. For a book about Christian liberty, surprisingly little is said about the theology of this complex subject. At the same time, while Turner cites a wide range of scholarship, his account needed to grapple more thoughtfully with the implications of those interpretations, an observation especially true for the most recent historiography on Indigenous peoples. Finally, while Turner doubtless intends his book to appeal to a broad range of readers, including non-scholars, the level of detail may prove intimidating to some, despite the narrator’s engaging and sometimes joyfully irreverent voice. [End Page 406] Turner’s two simple stories, while intended as mere sketches of popular views, offer a useful starting point for this review, as they highlight two dominant historiographical strands animating New England colonial history. Let us call these (1) the classic New England paradigm and its modern cousin, (2) the revised New England paradigm. In the classic paradigm, the historian’s gaze focuses on the sociopolitical structures of colonial New England, which was often envisioned as the most English of all the English colonies. Of course, many schools and methodologies fell under this classic model, which has exercised hegemonic dominance on historical interpretation for most of the modern era. In the revised paradigm, New England is envisioned as a region dominated by Indigenous polities as well as external global structures; expansionist English colonialism plays an important role, but in some histories, authors try to center Indigenous epistemologies. Here I think of the works of Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008) and Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (2019) or Kathleen M. Bragdon, The Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (1996) and its sequel, The Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (2009), which attend to Indigenous language, concepts, social organization and values. In the new paradigm, both colonizer and colonized are entitled to equal status as protagonists. Revisionists emphasize Indigenous agency, Atlantic World economies and contexts, and the politics of intercultural negotiation and resistance. These two scholarly poles each offer their own evidentiary imperatives, narrative lines, and exemplary tales—and each represents different parts of the elephant that is New England. The trick for the present-day scholar of colonial New England is to maintain a firm hold on all these contexts, remembering that New England is never just a “little England.” As I argued in my first book, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (2000), even...

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Alice L. Baumgartner (bio) Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) The 1860s was a decade of constitutional crisis in North America. In 1861, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in defense of slavery. [End Page 429] As Union and Confederate soldiers fought the opening battles of the war, the French army invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian archduke as its emperor. In 1867, the same year that republican forces in Mexico executed the French-imposed emperor, Canadian provinces and territories entered into confederation, resulting in greater independence from Britain. By examining these constitutional crises in relation to one another, Remaking North American Sovereignty not only deepens our understanding of sovereignty and state formation in the 1860s, but also models several different methodological approaches to researching and writing transnational history. Remaking North American Sovereignty is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Making Nations,” examines how sovereignty was reshaped and redefined in the 1860s. Steven Hahn looks at the familiar history of the Civil War from the “inside out” and “the southside north” in order to interrogate our assumptions about the development of capitalism, the abolition of slavery, and the geography of the sectional crisis. Andrew Smith points out the hemispheric factors that helped to convince most Canadians to remain part of the British Empire: British military might promised to guard against threatened invasions from the United States at the same time that the U.S. Civil War and political instability in Latin America demonstrated the dangers of republicanism. Pablo Mijango y González takes up the question of why Mexico and the United States each experienced a “constitutional revolution,” while Canada underwent a more peaceful process of “constitutional gradualism.” Robert Bonner explores the visual vocabulary of sovereignty across North America in order to show how sovereignty was not only conceived but visualized in new ways in the 1860s. Part 2, “Indigenous Polities,” assesses how Native peoples shaped and responded to the constitutional crises in North America. Jane Dinwoodie asks how Native groups who had resisted removal responded to the Civil War, showing that some tribes, such as the Eastern Cherokee, fought for the Confederacy in order to secure their claim to their lands, while others, such as the Bayou Lacombe Choctaws, tried to protect their communities by retreating to remote, inaccessible terrain. Ryan Hall analyzes Blackfoot treaty-making to show both similarities and connections between state expansion in the United States and Canada. Marcela Terrazas y Basante studies how Indian raids shaped the construction of sovereignty at the national, state, and local levels in Mexico. Part 3, “The Complications of the Market,” looks at conceptions of sovereignty at a more granular level. Christopher Clark shows how the [End Page 430] expansion of freeholding, promoted by the distribution of homesteads and the allotment of tribal lands, extended and transformed national power in the United States. Benjamin H. Johnson compares Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to reexamine the consequences of greater national power in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Mary P. Ryan takes up debates over landownership in the San Francisco Bay area to understand how different scales of authority—municipal, state, and federal—contest and, in the process, construct conceptions of sovereignty. These essays speak to one another in ways that enrich our understanding of state formation and transformation in the 1860s. One of the greatest ironies of Greater Reconstruction was, as Frank Towers writes in the introduction, “the simultaneous drive by President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves in the South and conquer indigenous states in the West” (8). The issue of sovereignty helps to resolve the apparent contradiction. As Steven Hahn explains, the constitutional crises of the nineteenth-century United States revolved around “the various challenges and obstacles to a national sovereignty, about competing sovereignties and their eventual defeats, whether they were slaveholding, Native American, Mormon, or some other” (25). Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in order to defeat the Confederate States of America. After...

Atlantic Environments and the American South ed. by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson

Reviewed by: Atlantic Environments and the American South ed. by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson Tycho de Boer Atlantic Environments and the American South. Edited by Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson. Environmental History and the American South. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 226. Paper $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5669-3; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5648-8.) Atlantic Environments and the American South brings together contributions stemming from a 2016 symposium at Rice University that explored "the intersection of Atlantic, environmental, and southern historiographies" (p. 2). These fields, Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson explain in their introduction, "developed in response to specific contexts and certain questions that have largely forestalled cross-field pollination" (p. 2). Broadly speaking, the editors contend that historians of the Atlantic world have not sufficiently centered the environment in their "multivalent, sociocultural histories" of slavery and empire; the history of American South, understood as part of a circum-Caribbean or a British Greater Caribbean, provides a useful geographic lens through which to view that central role (p. 3). The collection does not propose a paradigmatic approach to such an intersectional history. Instead, its sections—"Slavery and Climate," "Slavery and Landscape," "Empire and Infrastructure," "Empire and Expertise"—suggest more nuanced understandings of the ways different peoples, rival empires, and competing epistemologies interacted with one another and with different, shifting environments to shape [End Page 326] the American South as both a distinct region and a node in the networks of exchange that constituted the Atlantic world. Bradford J. Wood, for example, argues in "Ocean Graveyards and Ulterior Atlantic Worlds: The Experience of Colonial North Carolina" that our axiomatic understanding of "the Atlantic Ocean as a means of connection" does not apply to North Carolina, whose treacherous coastline prevented the colony from establishing those connections that drove large-scale environmental change elsewhere and gave rise to the concept of a larger, interconnected Atlantic world (p. 113). Frances Kolb shows in "Profitable Transgressions: International Borders and British Atlantic Trade Networks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1763–1783" that the Mississippi River, designated a boundary between empires, instead fostered multidirectional exchange and movement in the borderlands of the Lower Mississippi Valley, with small Indigenous polities known as petites nations rejecting exclusive loyalty to either Great Britain or Spain when it came to trade. Sean Morey Smith shows how authors promoting settlement in the British colonies relied on various theories regarding hot climates and health, not just the "old ideas of latitudinal climate zones," to hail the "salubrious" qualities of England's overseas possessions (p. 21). Elaine Lafay notes in her chapter how planters in the antebellum South concerned themselves with proper ventilation of their own dwellings and those of their slaves, yet resisted slaves' attempts to improve their drafty quarters or enjoy the "fresh air" they equated with freedom and autonomy (p. 38). Environmental aspects of planters' control over slave labor also inform Hayley Negrin's chapter on Native women, whose traditional roles in crop cultivation the English disparaged as uncivilized but whose labor they nonetheless sought forcibly to employ in their fields, and Keith Pluymers's chapter on Bermuda, where the sought-after expertise of Afro-Bermudians was crucial to the development of both tobacco cultivation and slavery. Melissa N. Morris highlights the importance of Spanish and Indigenous crops and expertise to the rise of Virginia's tobacco culture, further stressing the exchange of environmental resources and knowledge among diverse peoples and places within the circum-Caribbean. Matthew Mulcahy's chapter on drought challenges notions of this world as singularly hot, wet, and plagued by hurricanes and shows how droughts severely impacted island populations and often spurred slave resistance and rebellion. Peter C. Messer's closing chapter on "The Nature of William Bartram's Travels," while somewhat incongruous, nevertheless underscores this collection's useful contribution to the scholarship: just as the nature of the American Southeast resisted classification according to the rigid taxonomies of old and prompted William Bartram to evoke the sublime and make it known on its own terms, so do the essays in this collection suggest fresh new ways that environmental history can...

Replaying Colonialism: Indigenous National Sovereignty and Its Limits in Strategic Videogames

This article examines the pitfalls and potentialities of the recent inclusion of indigenous nations in the strategic videogame series Europa Universalis and Civilization. By making protagonists of dynamic indigenous nations—and putting them on the same plane as the nations of Europe and Asia—newer entries in these series encourage players to think of indigenous polities as sovereign, active, and independent. This is a seeming break from earlier iterations that portrayed them as alien Others. However, both series remain reliant on settler colonial mechanics of play, portraying Native nations as dynamic, future-oriented, and modern only via universalized, Eurocentric metrics of achievement, and participation in the conquest of an "empty" world. The newer versions of Europa Universalis and Civilization encourage players to consider aspects of indigenous sovereignty, but remain freighted with a colonizing vision that "sees" only national and imperial power as legitimate. These games allow for indigenous sovereignty only within that lens. While there is potential within the genre to communicate messages of indigenous sovereignty and dynamism in ways unusual in popular media, these game series (and the genre of which they are a part) remain mired in settler colonial assumptions.

A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation by J. Daniel d'Oney

Reviewed by: A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation by J. Daniel d'Oney Elizabeth Ellis A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation. By J. Daniel d'Oney. Indians of the Southeast. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xxiv, 199. $60.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-1879-7.) A Kingdom of Water: Adaptation and Survival in the Houma Nation is an accessible and engaging account of more than three centuries of Houma adaptation and resilience. This work also explicitly engages with the United Houma Nation's ongoing fight for federal recognition and is informed by the author's conversations with Houma community members. J. Daniel d'Oney's blending of contemporary political context and expansive historical research is sure to be of interest to scholars of Louisiana history and contemporary Indian policy. In the late seventeenth century, the Lower Mississippi Valley was home to many small Indigenous polities. The Houmas, who were one of these small Native nations, shaped the development of the region during the colonial era, and their ingenuity and innovation have enabled them to retain lands and [End Page 322] communities in the Gulf South through the present day. A Kingdom of Water helps explain how Houmas achieved this monumental feat. D'Oney's early chapters trace the development of Houma and French partnerships during the eighteenth century. The author's work builds on Daniel Usner's arguments about the importance of small Native nations for the Louisiana colony, and d'Oney emphasizes the power that Houmas exercised during this era. The second chapter critically appraises the consequences of the relationships between the Houmas and the French settlers. The Houmas' entanglement with them brought violence and epidemics to the nation, even as their alliances could be politically and economically advantageous. Throughout these first chapters, d'Oney also opens a conversation about the challenges of telling Houma history with sparse documentary records and through accounts written by colonists who did not understand Houma politics or society. This thread carries through the whole of the monograph, and the author's focus on how outsiders' erroneous and misleading reports have caused problems for generations of Houmas is one of the strongest interventions of the book and a critical part of d'Oney's ultimate argument about how misinformation has stymied the nation's fight for federal recognition. If Houmas were able to achieve influence and economic advantage through their partnerships with the French during the first half of the eighteenth century, after 1750 the onslaught of settlers into their homelands led to a steady decline in Houma power. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the wave of land losses around the turn of the nineteenth century as Louisiana and the U.S. federal government refused to recognize the Houmas as a sovereign Indian nation with territorial rights to their homelands. D'Oney highlights the way Houmas continued to integrate outsiders into their community as a means of survival during this era, but sometimes his language and analysis falter as he describes the collision of Indigenous modes of kinship with settler racial ideologies. The fifth chapter expands on the consequences of this erasure of the Houmas' ethnic and racial identities as Indians, and their political rights as a nation, in the mid-twentieth century. The final chapter, which focuses on the nation's fight for recognition, provides a powerful demonstration of how a combination of local business interests, federal policies, and misrepresented Houma history was mobilized to prevent Houmas from securing federal acknowledgment. D'Oney's analysis of the harm that Jim Crow–era racial ideologies caused Houmas resonates with Malinda Maynor Lowery's work on North Carolina and Brian Klopotek's work on Louisiana, and this book contributes to the growing body of scholarship on unremoved southern Native nations. Readers may wish that rather than highlighting conflicts between the United Houma Nation and other unrecognized Louisiana tribal nations, d'Oney had expanded his critique of recognition to examine how the federal process hurts all of these nations, but this critique is perhaps beyond the scope of the work. Regardless, d'Oney has provided a fresh and urgently needed narrative of Houma survivance...

Tribes and Towns: What Historians Still Get Wrong about the Roanoke Ventures

AbstractThe Theodor De Bry map of the coast of today’s North Carolina has exerted an unfortunate influence over how historians and anthropologists have described and understood the indigenous Algonquian communities of the Outer Banks and the coast of today’s North Carolina, and so how they have interpreted Sir Walter Ralegh’s colonizing ventures. The map is the bedrock on which many scholars have erected their own interpretations of the indigenous polities of the coastal Carolina region. The “tribes” etched by De Bry and described by subsequent scholars, in other words, seldom appear as meaningful entities in the surviving records. By tracing their imagined course, by adding to and elaborating on a map that reflected the biases and preconceptions of European observers, one risks missing much indeed and imposing on the region’s native peoples frameworks of social organization that most likely would have struck them as utterly foreign and wrong.

The British flag on both sides of Indian Ocean: Coloniserrsquo;s rational

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British established themselves as the major power in the Indian Ocean Region, a position won by aggressive commercial activity, maritime power, and incessant fighting against indigenous polities and European ‘great power’ rivals. Indian sub-continent was ruled by the British East Indian Company for hundred years whose eventual end was precipitated by the Indian mutiny of 1857. The following year the British crown assumed control over India using both direct and indirect methods, until 1947. Now on East Africa side, British formal acceptance of a sphere of influence on the main land was brought many new responsibility, opportunity and problems. As a signatory of the Berlin Conference in 1885, Britain was obligated to Africans, stop out the slave trade, and open the continent for commercial development and missionary enterprise. Historians have argued that the British acquired not only an opportunity to augment her imperial real to settle a new area with British people and to build another great British dominion but also an opportunity to ease the burden of administration in India by providing an overseas outlet for Indian burgeoning population. To develop Africa along with the responsibility of India, Indians were encouraged and transported to east Africa by their colonial master as railway workers, artisans, small traders and as soldiers. Famous British colonial administrator F.D. Lugard argued that the railway construction to east Africa would promote India immigration to East Africa who would be involved to develop Africa. However, the Europeans rulers boasted of themselves as remaining the rulers of Africa, and lowly categorized Indians as developers and the African as labourers. The article therefore, examines the role of Indians who were accorded by their colonial masters to develop East Africa. Further this, this would even critically asses the role of British policies towards the racial differences between two communities, Indians and Africans. Finally, it will uncover the British desire who tactfully raised their national flag on both sides of Indian Ocean.

Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers

Reviewed by: Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers F. Todd Smith Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal. By Gregory D. Smithers. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 260. Notes, bibliography, index.) Employing the voluminous amount of secondary works dealing with southern Native Americans that have been published in the last two decades, Gregory D. Smithers has written a short and accessible overview of the southern Indian experience up to 1840 that will have great value for college students and professors alike. Although the book includes details concerning numerous different Indigenous groups of various languages—Muscogean, Southern Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan—the author has done a fine job in clearly presenting his main theme of Native cultural continuity in times of extreme hardship and change. Smithers defines the Native South as extending eastward from the Louisiana-Texas border to the Atlantic Ocean, and southward from the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico. (Although Texas is not included in his definition, the author does provide a bit of information on the Caddo Indians—the Tejas of Spanish Texas—due to the groups that resided in western Louisiana). Chronologically, the book begins with the question of origins and examines how these interrogations relate to issues of storytelling and identity among Native southerners. Throughout the entire work, Smithers intersperses Native oral traditions and viewpoints with the findings of modern secondary research. The author also makes sure to demonstrate how Native southerners coped with fluctuations in climate and local ecosystems, adopting new technologies and agricultural innovations as they saw fit. One of the highlights of the book is Smithers' explanation of the Mississippian chiefdoms that emerged in the centuries prior to European contact, along with concise descriptions of how kinship networks and clan systems functioned while buttressing chiefdom societies, subjects that are often baffling to the modern reader. Smithers also discusses the "Mississippi Shatter Zone" in the early eighteenth century, demonstrating how disease, warfare, and European colonial endeavors that inspired slave raiding caused the chiefdoms to decline and splinter. However, tribes such as the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees built on their communal identities to coalesce during this period, enabling them to overcome the dangerous situation they found themselves in. [End Page 361] The situation became even more threatening for Native southerners during the era of the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. The violence and warfare that resulted between Indigenous polities, combined with their involvement in the various wars, caused small-scale migrations within the Southeast, notably among the Cherokees. The author also charts the history of the development and migration of the Seminoles into northern Florida as a complex story of ethnogenesis, demonstrating how their emergence amounted to something more than a group of Lower Creeks migrating out of the Creek Confederacy. Instead, he shows how these dynamic communities had their ethnic origins among smaller tribes such as the Oconees, Yamasees, and other Florida Natives. The discussion of the Seminole emergence is an example of the author's commitment to investigating the smaller, forgotten Southern tribes, highlighting how the book is not just concerned with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that usually dominate the discussion of Native southerners. Late eighteenth-century wars provided the backdrop for rekindling Native religious revivals and attempts to forge pan-Indian alliances as a means of countering the growing power of the American republic. Although these movements failed, ultimately leading to removal in the 1830s, Smithers shows how the Native southerners were able to hold onto their social and cultural traditions, maintained their Native languages, and worked to nurture bonds of kinship and community in Indian Territory. Native Southerners is a sophisticated overview of the history of the region's Indigenous groups, combining the latest historical research with Native oral traditions to provide an excellent introduction to the subject for students and teachers. F. Todd Smith University of North Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

European Empires in the American South: Colonial and Environmental Encounters, ed. Joseph P. Ward

In recent years, an ever-growing number of historians have turned their attention to what became the southern third of the modern United States. Some of the most influential studies have focused on the south-west and south-central regions, the territory from the Pacific coast through Texas, a vast terrain that was the home of powerful indigenous polities, including Comanches and Caddos. This book, edited by Joseph P. Ward, turns our attention to the east, the arc of territory that stretches from Chesapeake Bay through the Louisiana country and then back to Florida. Gone is the history of the south as a story of white planters and their enslaved workers toiling to produce tobacco or cotton, two commodities that seem invisible here (and are not even in the index). In its place, the contributors put indigenous peoples and communities or local nature at the centre of their interpretations. They are of course...

Introduction

Engaging critically with literature on mimesis, colonialism, and the state in anthropology and history, this introduction argues for an approach to mimesis and imitation as constitutive of the state and its forms of rule and governmentality in the context of late European colonialism. It explores how the colonial state attempted to administer, control, and integrate its indigenous subjects through mimetic policies of governance, while examining how indigenous polities adopted imitative practices in order to establish reciprocal ties with, or to resist the presence of, the colonial state. In introducing this special issue, three main themes will be addressed: mimesis as a strategic policy of colonial government, as an object of colonial regulation, and, finally, as a creative indigenous appropriation of external forms of state power.