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. Neither side, however, could deal the other a knockout blow during the War for American Independence, or indeed until the 1790s.
By that time, the American rebels had created a powerful national government that could project substantial military power into the southern Lakes region. Chapter 7 reveals that this political revolution in the United States coincided with a similar Lakes Indian movement toward political confederation, on a more ambitious scale than the pan-Indian alliance of the 1760s. By 1786 the confederates had created the United Indian nations, a military alliance with its own foreign relations and capital towns. While the United Indians remained open to a diplomatic settlement with the United States, their warriors continued to harry American settlements in Kentucky and in the new Northwest Territory, and they decisively defeated two federal armies sent against them in 1790–91. Gradually, however, the confederacy began to reveal signs of weakness: its constituent nations disagreed with and occasionally even fought one another, and its British allies and trading partners declined to risk a war with the Americans on the United Indians’ behalf. The Americans, for their part, had begun building a stronger national government in the 1790s, one with sufficient resources to build forts, maneuver large armies, and win battles far from their Ohio valley bases. One of these battles, at Fallen Timbers in 1794, proved so successful that it compelled the United Indians to sign the Treaty of Greenville and break up their confederacy.
After 1795 the Americans became the dominant population in the southeastern Lakes region. Within a few years they began pressuring the southern Lakes Indians for land cessions that would enlarge the American empire’s settlements and solidify its political power. Yet, as chapter 8 points out, the Lakes Indians still retained a lot of control over their own fates. Many, particularly in the northern Lakes country, continued to maintain their political autonomy and practice commercial hunting as they had done for over a century. Some, chiefly in the southern Lakes country, continued a shift to commercial agriculture that they had begun in the early 1700s. A third political and cultural strategy, proposed by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh, emphasized a revival of nativism and the creation of a new, self-sufficient Indian nation-state. This last strategy, however, demonstrated the limits on Lakes Indian political autonomy, insofar as American officials like William Henry Harrison viewed it as a threat to the American regime’s sovereignty and its steady transfer of land from Indians to white Americans. Ultimately, the Americans responded to Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh’s movement with violence, and they crushed their confederacy on the battlefield within a couple of years during the War of 1812.
In many respects, the United States performed badly in that war, failing to obtain most of its military and political objectives. Chapter 9 notes, however, that the Americans did manage to win a major political and diplomatic victory: Britain largely withdrew its traders and officials from the Lakes country after 1815, giving the Americans a much freer hand with the Lakes Indians. During the next fifteen years, American expansion into the region proceeded in earnest, as soldiers garrisoned strategic points in the upper and western Lakes, treaty commissioners bought up most of the remaining Indian lands in Michigan and the southern Lakes states, American traders drew Lakes Indians ever more deeply into debt, Protestant missionaries tried to remake Native Americans in their own image, and American settlers engulfed southern Lakes Indian towns and turned them into enclaves in a white man’s country.9
The Lakes nations could survive this invasion, and they even turned some of the invaders to their own advantage, but by the late 1820s the American national government had decided that it would not tolerate remnant Indian communities in the eastern United States. A combination of racism, fear of racial violence, desire for Native American resources, and a belief that Indians impeded economic progress propelled the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the relocation of the entire eastern Indian population to reservations west of the Missouri River. Over the following two decades, federal commissioners used a combination of economic pressure, veiled threats, and fraud to relocate nearly all of the southern Lakes Indians to modern Kansas and either removed or confined to small reservations the larger Indian nations of the northern Lakes region.
Chapter 10 demonstrates that removal occurred in the face of widespread resistance by Native Americans, and that the Lakes Indians fought hard against forced emigration and against political dissolution after removal. The Ojibwas, most of the Odawas, and the Menominees managed to remain in the Great Lakes region, and individual families and communities of Ho-Chunks, Miamis, and Potawatomis either illicitly returned to their homelands or moved to Upper Canada. Those Lakes Indian nations compelled to move west continued to exercise autonomous control over their collective fates, to manage their own economic affairs, and to organize new tribal governments and institutions. It was not until the 1860s that rapacious white settlers and another shattering continent-wide war forced many of them to migrate to new homes in Oklahoma or the Dakotas.
* * *
Such are the chronological boundaries of this book. Its geographic focus deserves some explanation here, as does the author’s particular definitions of “Lakes region” and “Lakes Indians.” Peoples of the Inland Sea studies the Native American peoples of the six American states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) located south and west of Lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior, and of those parts of Ontario situated north and east of Lakes Huron, Ontario, and Superior. The Six Nations Iroquois, who historically lived in the geographic borderland between the Lakes and the Atlantic seaboard, have a similarly liminal presence here. The book does not provide a detailed overview of their history, but it does discuss Iroquois relationships with the other Lakes Indians, their alliances and struggles with the French and British empires (and the United States), and the migration of many into Canada and Wisconsin.
While defining my terms, I should note that Native American nomenclature is often a thorny subject, since Indians’ self-labels (or eponyms) often differ from the national names that their indigenous neighbors or European explorers gave them. Generally, I have employed the ethnic names most commonly found in anglophone records, as a courtesy to readers wishing to conduct more research in specific Indian peoples’ histories. Naturally, there are exceptions and qualifications to this rule. I employ the term “Ohio Iroquois” in referring to the so-called Mingoes, who received their derisive common name from the Six Nations Iroquois. The Ho-Chunks would not have appreciated the defamatory moniker that Anglo-Americans
