The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent By Kathleen DuVal, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia: PA, 2006, pp. 320, US$45.00 (hardback), US$22.50 (paper).
This review first appeared in the Australasian Journal of American Studies, 2008, Vol. 27 Issue 2, pp. 156-158.
The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent
Kathleen DuVal
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Between about 1790 and 1820, some five thousand settlers poured across the Mississippi to build farms along the Arkansas River and to hunt deer, bear and buffalo for profit. In doing so, they came into conflict with the Arkansas Osages, and eventually began a bloody decade-long war in which they enlisted the help of the United States government by labelling the Osages enemies of civilisation and progress, and demanding land cessions. The settlers eventually defeated the Osages militarily and politically, ending those Indians’ century-long domination and forcing them off their lands. As Kathleen DuVal notes, this is a familiar story in nineteenth-century America. Only these new settlers crossing the Mississippi were not Anglo-Americans, but Cherokees. This is but one of the many surprising and illuminating events that DuVal uncovers in The Native Ground. Drawing on a host of pioneering studies by historians such as James Axtell, James Merrell, Neal Salisbury, and especially Daniel Richter and Richard White, DuVal shifts our perspective to look outward from the ‗heart of the continent‘– along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers – a country that was definitively Native Ground’ for most of its human history.
Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this area was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. But it is the centuries-long migrations of successive groups of Native peoples that dominate this tale as Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees vied with each other for control of the region and its resources. In wonderful detail, and drawing on a wide array of archaeological, historical, and oral testimony, DuVal recreates the worlds of each of the many different native inhabitants of the region and especially their strategies for dealing with the arrival of newcomers in their midst. Thus we learn that the Quapaws actively courted potentially useful neighbours, adopted newcomers, developed keen diplomatic skills and adapted to changes in a manner that allowed them to play a prominent role in a region relatively new to them for well over a century of tumultuous migrations of newcomers. On the other hand, the Quapaws’ nearby neighbours, the Osages, more often conducted a successful policy of violence to effect their trading and territorial ambitions. Indeed, over the course of the eighteenth century the Osage people used their relatively large numbers and access to resources to develop one of the largest trading systems in North America, often by force. They created, as DuVal wryly notes, an ‘empire in the west’. By shifting perspective and focusing on the worlds of this native ground, DuVal of course compels us to think about Indian-European relations in a different light. Far from their own centres of power, successive Spanish, French, English, and American newcomers were often far more dependent on Indians in the region than Indians were on them. And though they claimed this native ground for their own imperial mapmakers, colonisation is hardly the right word to describe relations between Europeans and Indians. Indeed, if Europeans wanted to stay, they had to play by Indian rules - whether that meant engaging in rituals of gift-giving and exchange with the Quapaws, or promising military support for the Osages’ campaigns against unfriendly neighbours. Indians effectively drew Europeans into local patterns of land and resource allocation, trade, diplomacy, warfare and even gender relations. Thus incorporation, rather than accommodation or resistance, more adequately describes relations between successive groups of newcomers. Europeans were unable to resist. But if Indians retained control over the native ground at the heart of the continent for centuries before and after the arrival of Europeans, they were eventually forced to relinquish it by the middle of the nineteenth century. By then, American settlers had poured into the region in significantly large numbers and with new ideas of landownership, race and citizenship persuasive enough to compel the federal government to lend its support to them. In the face of these combined forces, Quapaw diplomacy was ineffective, and Osage and Cherokee military might had been considerably drained by their fighting against each other. The era of incorporation came to a rapid end, replaced by a federally sponsored era of Indian removal. Still, if the new United States took over the heart of the continent by the middle of the nineteenth century, Indians remained firmly enmeshed in the cultural, political, and economic history that unfolded on native ground. The states of Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri still bear the names of the region‘s nations, as do other places such as Wichita, Osage Gap, Pawhuska, and the Quapaw Quarter. But more importantly, Osages, Quapaws, Cherokees, Caddos and Wichitas all remain in the region and have regained some measure of sovereignty. Over the past two centuries, as DuVal points out, these Indians have ‘shifted, but not abandoned their past views of themselves and their world, while adapting to opportunities in tourism, gaming, and the courts’. (p.248) Indeed, if DuVal can be faulted for anything, it is in giving short shrift to the continued ‘presence’ of Indians on this native ground in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She only hints at the complexity of the story we might find. Yet if it is only half as rich as the story she has already uncovered and told in such illuminating detail, it is a story worth telling yet.