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The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America

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In 1779, Shawnees from Chillicothe, a community in the Ohio country, told the British, "We have always been the frontier." Their statement challenges an oft-held belief that American Indians derive their unique identities from longstanding ties to native lands. By tracking Shawnee people and migrations from 1400 to 1754, Stephen Warren illustrates how Shawnees made a life for themselves at the crossroads of empires and competing tribes, embracing mobility and often moving willingly toward violent borderlands. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Shawnees ranged over the eastern half of North America and used their knowledge to foster notions of pan-Indian identity that shaped relations between Native Americans and settlers in the revolutionary era and beyond.
Warren's deft analysis makes clear that Shawnees were not anomalous among Native peoples east of the Mississippi. Through migration, they and their neighbors adapted to disease, warfare, and dislocation by interacting with colonizers as slavers, mercenaries, guides, and traders. These adaptations enabled them to preserve their cultural identities and resist coalescence without forsaking their linguistic and religious traditions.

ISBN-13: 9781469627274

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Publication Date: 02-01-2016

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

Stephen Warren is associate professor of history and American Studies at the University of Iowa and was a historian for the PBS documentary "We Shall Remain," which aired in 2009.

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From the Publisher

An important and much-needed book on the early history of the Shawnees and mid-America. In this outstanding history, Warren situates Shawnees within the colonial world of Indian and European interactions as well as in the world of Indian and Indian interactions. As a result, the Shawnees come alive as people caught in a changing world, figuring out ways to survive and take advantage of new opportunities that came their way.—Robbie Ethridge, author of From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715



Spanning time and space—from contemporary Shawnee communities to long-ago villages known only from archaeology, and from the Ohio Valley to the Southeast—Stephen Warren uncovers stories of a Native people buffeted but never defeated by colonialism. The Worlds the Shawnees Made impressively combines hard-headed detective work with great cultural sensitivity.—Daniel K. Richter, author of Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Rethinking Place and Identity in American Indian Histories 1

Part 1 Continuity and Reinvention at the Dawn of Colonization 25

2 The Parochial Cosmopolitans of the Middle Ohio Valley 27

3 Nitarikyk's Slave: A Fort Ancient Odyssey 57

Part 2 The Lure of Colonial Borderlands 81

4 A Ranging Sort of People: Migration and Slavery on the Savannah River 83

5 The Grand Village of the Kaskaskias: Old Allegiances, New Worlds 107

6 "Mixt Nations" at the Head of the Bay: The Iroquois, Bacon's Rebels, and the Peoples in Between 134

Part 3 Becoming Strangers: The Long History of Removal 155

7 One Head and One Heart: Migration, Coalescence, and Perm's Imagined Community on the Lower Susquehanna 157

8 One Colour and as One Body: Race, Trade, and Migration to the Ohio Country 180

9 Race, Revitalization, and Warfare in the Eighteenth-Century Southeast 208

Epilogue: Reconsidering the "Literary Advantage," 224

Notes 231

Bibliography 267

Index 291