Confident, Thwarted Modernizers Ann McGrath (bio) Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 376pp, 11 color plates, 32 halftones, 16 maps, 4 tables. $45.00 How can an incoming people relentlessly dismantle a thriving economy yet be remembered still as pioneering heroes? Why is it that sustained theft, gruesome torture, kidnapping, the razing of agricultural villages, and the outright killing of Native American peoples have not left a more visible scar on the psyche of mainstream America? In reassessing foundational mythologies, surely these founding national moments of Indigenous dispossession should feature prominently. And perhaps it was not in error that the book's short Google entry listed it in the genre of "true crime". Susan Sleeper-Smith's Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 demolishes the lingering imaginary of a masculine frontier where European prosperity drove out backward economies. Sleeper-Smith's Ohio River Valley is a modernizing native ground where Indigenous peoples took up new, transformative opportunities. Intermarriage and kin relationships entwined indigenous and colonizer societies whose sustained prosperity was destroyed by a state-led war over their rich lands. Destructive military actions not only razed crops and orchards, in the longer term they erased history. The tangible evidence of this striving world was lost in "burnt crops, charred villages, and the masculine monuments of destiny made manifest only by amnesia and self-interest" (p. 12). European newcomers to America tell us in vivid, often lengthy descriptions about the wealth of this riverine land and the Indigenous peoples who managed it. How beautiful is the countryside, how replete with fruit trees, corn fields, fish, and how visible is Indigenous people's industry. A network of Indian villages was populated by hardworking entrepreneurs, with a thriving fur trade economy in which Indian women successfully grew and traded old and new crops. This enabled Native peoples to import all kinds of goods from Europe, including luxury items. Indigenous men and women wore their [End Page 184] wealth in costumery and ornamentation, including beautiful silks, fine leather goods, and expertly crafted silver jewelry. That hypermasculine 'Wild West' with its hostile, maladaptive Indians is clearly wrong-headed. But even the more sophisticated conceptualization built upon Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991) hardly begins the gendered work that Sleeper-Smith offers in this landmark account. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest tells the story of Native Ground, a world substantially driven by the acumen of Indigenous women who created new economies that delivered co-operative relationships between many Indian nations and that actively traded with European nations. It builds upon significant work on Indian women and their interconnected Indigenous cultural landscapes, including Lisa Brooks's The Common Pot (2008). Nor should breakthrough work such as that of Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women (1998) or Gunlog Fur's A Nation of Women (2009) on the Delaware Indians be overlooked. In the first chapter, the Ohio River almost becomes an actor in itself, and we gain an appreciation of how humans used it as nurturer, conduit, and barrier. Influenced by the environmental history turn, Sleeper-Smith brings a knowledge of the river's geography and of the complex array of tribal groups that operated its interdependent mode of national/tribal networks. Copious historical testimony underpins her irrefutable argument that American conquest crushed the Ohio's prosperous Indian world of agriculture, trade, material wealth, and style. Fact after fact, document after document demonstrate that it was not Indian ferocity or failure to modernize that saw Native nations imperiled but American conquest that left Indian men, women and children slaughtered. We witness military contingents robbing whole villages of troves of movable wealth and of productive family members. Indigenous men fought and retaliated, initially winning against poor Anglo-American leadership and military contingents. Although Indians gained an enduring stereotypical reputation for barbarism, Sleeper-Smith reveals that the most terrible Indian retaliations in the Ohio River Valley only occurred after sustained colonizer atrocities. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest should spark a rethinking of American history...
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Jan 26, 2021
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