This book details the growth of the European Fur trade in North America and how it drew the Native Americans who lived in the Great Lakes region, notably the Huron, Dakota, Sauk and Fox, Miami and Shawnee tribes into the colonial European Wars. During the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, these tribes took sides and became important allies of the warring nations. However, slowly the Indians were pushed westward by the encroachment of more settlers. This tension finally culminated in the 1832 Black Hawk's War, which ended with the deportation of many tribes to distant reservations.
A radical reinterpretation of early American history from a native point of view In Masters of Empire, the historian Michael McDonnell reveals the pivotal role played by the native peoples of the Great Lakes in the history of North America. Though less well known than the Iroquois or Sioux, the Anishinaabeg who lived along Lakes Michigan and Huron were equally influential. McDonnell charts their story, and argues that the Anishinaabeg have been relegated to the edges of history for too long. Through remarkable research into 19th-century Anishinaabeg-authored chronicles, McDonnell highlights the long-standing rivalries and relationships among the great tribes of North America, and how Europeans often played only a minor role in their stories. McDonnell reminds us that it was native people who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of trade and kinship, of which the French and British knew little. And as empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms at trading posts and frontier forts, they played a crucial role in the making of early America. Through vivid depictions of early conflicts, the French and Indian War, and Pontiac's Rebellion, all from a native perspective, Masters of Empire overturns our assumptions about colonial America and the origins of the Revolutionary War. By calling attention to the Great Lakes as a crucible of culture and conflict, McDonnell reimagines the landscape of American history.
This book describes in word and illustration the results of an exciting quest on the part of its authors to discover and record Indian rock paintings of Northern Ontario and Minnesota. Numerous drawings were made from these pictographs at a hundred different sites; the originals range in age from four to five hundred years to a thousand, and were done with the simplest materials: fingers for brushes, fine clay impregnated with ferrous oxide giving the characteristic red paint. Where an overhanging rock protected a vertical face from dripping water or on dry, naked rock faces the Indians recorded the forest life with which they lived in intimate association—deer, caribou, rabbit, heron, trout, canoes, animal tracks—and also abstractions which puzzle and intrigue the modern viewer. Many of the paintings could only have been done from a canoe or a convenient rock ledge. Selwyn Dewdney travelled many thousands of miles by canoe to make the drawings of the pictographs which illustrate every page of this fascinating and attractive book. He provides also a general analysis of the materials used by the Indians, of their subject-matter and the artistic rendering given to it, and his artist's journal records in detail the sites he visited, the paintings he found at each, the comparisons among them that came to mind, the references to rock paintings in early literature of the Northwest. Kenneth E. Kidd contributes a valuable essay on the anthropological background of the area, linking the rock paintings with early cave art in, for example, France and Spain, describing the life of the Indians in the Shield country, and commenting on what the pictographs reveal of their makers' attitudes to their external world and of their thinking. This is a book which will appeal to a wide audience: to those interested in primitive art forms and in Canadian art in general, to all students of the early history of North America, to travellers who in increasing numbers follow the canoe trails of the Shield lakes and rivers.
Presents a collection of folklore, poetry, speeches, songs, fiction, personal narratives, essays, and non-fiction prose by members of the Great Lakes Native nations.
This illustrated guide introduces the cultures of 25 tribes of Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan stock. Includes 139 sketches and paintings, plus a map showing the locations of each tribe.
An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.
For many thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, Michigan's native peoples, the Anishnabeg, thrived in the forests and along the shores of the Great Lakes. Theirs were cultures in delicate social balance and in economic harmony with the natural order. Rites of Conquest details the struggles of Michigan Indians - the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, and their neighbors - to maintain unique traditions in the wake of contact with Euro-Americans. The French quest for furs, the colonial aggression of the British, and the invasion of native homelands by American settlers is the backdrop for this fascinating saga of their resistance and accommodation to the new social order. Minavavana's victory at Fort Michilimackinac, Pontiac's attempts to expel the British, Pokagon's struggle to maintain a Michigan homeland, and Big Abe Le Blanc's fight for fishing rights are a few of the many episodes recounted in the pages of this book. -- from back cover.
Book covers all aspects of Indian Clothing and Adornment for an area that includes the Miami, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Chippewa, Kickapoo, Illini, Peoria, Shawnee, Delaware, Menominee, Sauk, Fox, Mascounten, Algonquin, Winnebago, Huron, Iowa and Eastern Sioux. With articles on finger weaving, ribbonwork and trade silver, this book will be usefull to anyone with interests in the culture and arts of the American Indian.
Forty-two carefully researched illustrations depict prehistoric Indians of the Arctic, woodland cultures in the Northeast, cliff dwellers of the Southwest, many more. Ready-to-color scenes include hunting, food-gathering, ceremonies, games, dances, and numerous other aspects of tribal life before the European arrival. Introduction. Captions. Map.
