Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
customs and stories and agency, a practice Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance,” in a changing physical and social milieu. The primary goal of this book is to explore these two struggles: one for political independence within a world of foreign empires, and one for cultural survival in an environment vastly altered by European goods, diseases, animals, and people. Like DuVal, Michael McDonnell, Cary Miller, and Michael Witgen, I will argue that in their dealings with Euro-American empires, the Lakes Indians often had the upper hand, for the Great Lakes was a region where France, Britain, and the early United States reached their logistical limits. The French and British had to make numerous accommodations to Lakes Indians’ norms and expectations in order to maintain even a tenuous claim on their loyalty. While the early American republic proved less willing to accommodate Native Americans, it learned that it had to do so. In its dealings with the southern Lakes Indians, the new United States relied as much on diplomacy and trade as on force, and it drew the sword only when not one but two Indian confederacies directly challenged it, during the 1790s and 1810s.5
More disruptive than imperial conflict were the other effects of European contact, like exposure to new diseases or to new technologies they could not easily replicate. Epidemic disease and warfare slowly bled out the Lakes Indians’ population, reducing it from approximately 170,000 in 1600 to a little more than 50,000 by the 1830s, while the fur trade led to intensified conflict between neighboring nations. Some compensated for land or population loss by intermarrying with Europeans, and epidemic diseases lost some of their edge as survivors became immune or as depleted nations (like the Iroquois) adopted war captives. Most avoided replacing all of their indigenous manufactures with European imports, continuing to wear skin and hide clothing, use bows and arrows, and manufacture canoes well into the eighteenth century. Some sought better prices for goods by trading with competing empires’ merchants, and men and women avoided relying on animal pelts as their sole saleable good, instead developing more diverse commercial economies: marketing food and clothing to white traders and miners, mining lead, working as boatmen, and raising livestock.
By the 1830s, the American “empire” had acquired a sufficiently large population, army, and treasury to undertake the kind of conquest that neither the French nor the British dreamed of: effacing Native Americans from the landscape of the Lakes country. Even during the removal era, though, when fifty thousand Lakes Indians faced off against a nation of thirty million Americans, Native peoples found ways to resist and even thwart American power. Some managed to delay emigration for a decade or more, some hid out in Wisconsin or Michigan or took refuge in British Canada, and between one-third and one-half of the Lakes Indians, with the help of sympathetic white settlers and officials, managed to avoid removal altogether. Those who did move faced sickness, death, and the trauma produced by loss of homelands and loved ones, but the survivors built new homes north of the Lakes and west of the Mississippi River. Most modern Americans should take little pride in their ancestors’ behavior toward Native Americans, but one can certainly appreciate the Lakes Indians’ demonstration of human toughness, resilience, and cultural durability.
* * *
Of the ten main chapters of Peoples of the Inland Sea, chapter 1 summarizes the long pre-Columbian history of the Great Lakes region, whose first human inhabitants arrived over ten thousand years ago. The early Lakes Indians began developing complex societies, with fixed settlements, ceremonial centers, and extensive trading networks, about three thousand years ago. One of these societies, the Mississippian culture, built settlements so large that the biggest of them, Cahokia, would have been a fair-sized city in medieval Europe.
Europeans surveying the mounds and earthworks that these pre-Columbian cultures built assumed that the post-Columbian inhabitants of the Lakes region had degenerated from more civilized predecessors. Actually, as chapter 2 observes, seventeenth-century Lakes Indians shared much in common with their “mound-builder” ancestors, as well as with each other. Though the 170,000 Native Americans living near the Great Lakes in 1600 belonged to more than a dozen different nations, most of them farmed, lived in towns, engaged in long-distance trade—the ethnic name of one nation, the Odawas, meant “traders”—and had complex social and political organization. Moreover, the early-modern Lakes Indians shared a common history of cultural disruption, if not trauma, in the wake of their first encounters (direct or indirect) with Europeans. Many succumbed to epidemic disease, or to Iroquois raiders whom the Dutch and English had armed, or had to abandon their homes and become refugees. Most succumbed to the lure of French merchandise, which improved their standard of living but also accustomed them to using goods they could not themselves manufacture.
By the end of the seventeenth century, where the narrative of chapter 3 begins, most of the Lakes nations shared another common trait: they had become military allies of the French empire. French officials viewed the Lakes Indians as future subjects and addressed them as the king’s “children,” but in practice France was the dependent partner in the relationship. Native American warriors defended, directly or indirectly, France’s scattered outposts in the “upper country,” and they effectively backed the kingdom’s claim to the interior of North America. Hence the repeated concessions that Indians were able to procure from French officials: millions of livres’ worth of gifts,6 tacit permission to trade with the British, and the use of Native legal customs when prosecuting interethnic crimes. French officials certainly understood this imbalance in their relationship with the Lakes Indians, and their insecurity eventually propelled them into the military buildup that precipitated the Seven Years’ (or “French and Indian”) War. Chapter 4 explains how that war strained and broke French power in North America, but it also observes that the same conflict demonstrated the power of France’s Indian allies. Lakes Indian raiding parties took hundreds of captives and essentially paralyzed two large British colonies, while several thousand other warriors took part in early French offensives and came to Montreal to offer their services as late as 1760. Only an ill-timed smallpox epidemic, skillful diplomacy, and a huge injection of military resources allowed Britain to neutralize the Lakes Indians and defeat the French army defending Canada.
Few British officials either tried or wanted to understand how much the French-American empire had depended on Native Americans, and how militarily powerful those Indians remained. And until they received a clear demonstration in Pontiac’s War, fewer still appreciated how readily the Great Lakes Indians could organize an autonomous military alliance. Chapter 5 explains how the Lakes nations undertook that extensive and coordinated attack on the British posts in their homeland. The motives driving Pontiac’s allies included “nativism,” the belief that whites and their material goods would poison Native Americans,7 but they also included opposition to British policies and nostalgic allegiance to the French. France’s political withdrawal from North America and Britain’s shift to a more accommodating Indian policy helped prevent another anti-British alliance from forming after the insurgency ended in 1764–65. Peace proved short-lived, however, thanks to the land hunger of colonial governments and Britain’s inability—and its unwillingness—to restrain colonial settlers.8
When those same settlers and colonies rebelled against the British Empire in the 1770s, the balance of power in the Great Lakes region finally began to tip against Native Americans. Chapter 6 observes that many of the southeastern Lakes nations entered the Revolutionary War on Britain’s side because colonial governments had injured them in ways analogous to Britain’s injury of the colonists, taking the Delawares’ and Shawnees’ principal source of autonomy and wealth—namely, their lands. Other Indians from the region fought for Britain to ensure access to trade goods or win martial glory; still others managed to sit out the war. As in earlier imperial conflicts, Lakes Indian warriors raided colonial settlements but could not permanently dislodge white settlers. Rebel militias then counterattacked and severely damaged Native American towns in Ohio—indeed, as chapter 7 notes, their raids in the 1770s and 1780s swept most of the future state of Ohio clear of human habitation.