Peoples of the Inland Sea by David Andrew Nichols

Author:David Andrew Nichols [Nichols, David Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

Reckoning with the Conquerors

BY 1812, THE GREAT LAKES REGION HAD EXPERIENCED MORE THAN a century of imperial rivalry, first between the French and British and then between Britain and the United States. Residing on a borderland between rival empires, distant from the centers of colonial settlement, the Lakes Indians had more success maintaining their autonomy than if they had faced only one imperial power. Native American nations could seek concessions from both rivals by stoking their fears of each other and making Indian alliance a negotiable asset. Political autonomy, in turn, allowed Indian communities to find different solutions to the vexing problems of environmental and economic change. Some, mostly in the southern Lakes country, selectively adapted elements of American culture, like livestock. Some adopted European goods but retained their own traditional beliefs and lifeways. Still others, motivated by the new creed of nativism, rejected commerce, acculturation, and engagement with the American empire.1

The problem with borderlands is that they often become battle fronts when war breaks out between the bordering empires. Consequently, those empires view disloyalty by borderlands peoples as a security threat. The United States considered Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s city-state of Prophetstown so grave a danger that it sent an army against the nativist defenders well before the start of the Anglo-American war, and the US force continued to harry Tecumseh’s confederates until their captain died in battle two years later. When the War of 1812 ended, leaving the United States with an ambiguous peace settlement, American insecurity fastened on another group of Indians: those of the northern Great Lakes, who traded with whites but avoided adopting their culture. Before the war, their homeland had been a “native ground” where Native Americans set the rules of interaction rather than a “middle ground” where they accommodated colonial powers. After 1815, white Americans sought to change the landscape dramatically, to turn the northern Lakes country into a middle ground and, eventually, into a white man’s country.2

In the north, after 1815, the United States augmented its political and economic power, building new forts, making the occasional show of force against nations like the Ho-Chunks, replacing British traders with the American Fur Company, and pressing the Anishinaabeg for land on which it could plant frontier settlements, future reserves of American power. In the south, American officials pressed the Miamis, Wyandots, and others for ever-larger land cessions, with the aim of either driving them across the Mississippi River or forcing them to live under the authority of settler-controlled state governments. American policy left some room for the southern Lakes Indians to maneuver, to negotiate with white officials, to find new ways of making of living, and to teach their children skills adapted to a new environment. What the region’s Native American population could not forget, however, was how massively American military power had grown by the end of the 1812–15 war, and how easily that hammer could fall on them again if they tried once more to follow Tecumseh’s path.

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The second Anglo-American war,

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