{"id":17,"date":"2019-11-27T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/?page_id=17"},"modified":"2021-11-03T22:56:56","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T22:56:56","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“<\/strong>Capt. Jonny, a Shawnee chief, spoke on behalf of the three first mentioned nations in that Country:
Brethren! Virginians! you know the other day we were fighting, you desired us to be quiet. we are so. you requested us to observe the councils of our Forefathers and act according to their customs. We people of one Colour are United, so that we make but one man, that has but one Heart and one Mind. …You are drawing close to us and so near our bedsides that we can almost hear the noise of your axes felling our Trees and settling our Country. According to the Lines settled by our Forefathers, the Boundary is the Ohio River, but you are coming upon the ground given to us by the Great Spirit. We wish you to be strong and keep your people on that side of the River. We have no objections to carry on Trade with your Traders, provided they do not attempt to settle in our Country, but it is too clear to us your design is to take our Country from us. we remind you that you will find all the people of our Colour in this Island strong unanimous, and determined to act as one man in Defense of it, therefore be strong and keep your people within Bounds, or we shall take up a Rod and whip them back to your side of the Ohio.<\/p> Message transcribed and transmitted by Charles McCormick, Commissioner & Clerk British Indian Department, Detroit, 31 May 1785 in Michigan Historical Collections<\/em> 25 (1896), 692. <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disregarding metropolitan directives, American colonizers pushed into Native territories west of the Allegheny Mountains and immediately began the simultaneous processes of dispossession, land surveys, and settlement between 1780 and 1787.[1]<\/a> However, a number of powerful competing Native groups resided there, and the lands northwest of the Ohio River became important sites of Indigenous resistance, accommodation, and persistence. While the colonizers sought to capitalize on growing fault lines among Native groups by attempting to anoint more amenable Indigenous leaders, those same Native individuals inveigled the colonizers for the chance to become power brokers. Those who successful reaped the rewards of negotiation \u2013 increased socio-political status, access to trade goods, particularly weapons, and the de facto<\/em> authority to either make peace or war. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The process of transforming the American\ncolonies into states equal in status and rights with the original thirteen was\na complicated, contested, and fraught undertaking. This transition was not\nmerely the result of top-down policies. Frequently, legislation was slow to\ncatch up to events that had already transpired on the ground. Rather, settlers,\nmilitiamen, soldiers, and Native resistance leaders in the contested\nterritories compelled the m\u00e9tropoles to craft policies to govern and protect\ntheir newly acquired colonies.[2]<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In North America, violent exchanges\nescalated as increasing numbers of Euro-Americans moved into the backcountry.\nTheir presence put greater pressure on already tense relations between the\ncolonists and their Indigenous neighbors. At the same time, the appearance of\nsurveyors signified the American belief that Native lands were, or would soon\nbecome, the property of the United States. Coercive treaty negotiations with\nunauthorized representatives of Wabash and Ohio Valley Indigenous communities\nfurther strained relations between American settlers, authorities, and Native\ncommunities in and near the contested territories.[3]<\/a>\nEven as American militias led campaigns against Native villages and settlers\nflooded into disputed territories, Indigenous leaders fought legal, diplomatic,\nand military battles to protect their homelands and families. Some maintained\nties with Great Britain to acquire arms and ammunition; others forged trade\nconnections with the Spanish in St. Louis and New Orleans to the same ends.[4]<\/a>\nEach of the stakeholders in the contest for the Wabash Valley strove to protect\ntheir interests against competing claims, even at the cost of their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the transition\nto settler colonial rule, the new colonizers sought to dictate the meaning of\nindigeneity and whose voices counted in diplomatic negotiations. Nevertheless,\nin the first decades of colonization Indigenous communities in both the United\nStates and Algeria successfully insisted that the colonizers respect two\nprecepts: (1) Indigenous communities bestowed authority, not the colonizers, on\nthose who represented their interests in negotiations with the invading\nmilitary and political leaders; and (2) colonizers could only access Native\/autochthonous\nlands legally<\/em> by agreeing to Native\nterms. The only alternative was violence. However, resorting to this drastic\naction was costly in both men and supplies, and Indigenous communities made the\ncolonizers pay dearly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent work on the Ohio River Valley has underscored the agency of individuals who inhabited and emigrated to this territory \u2013 Native peoples, African Americans, and the settler-soldier colonizers.[5]<\/a> Through their relationships \u2013 intimate, formal, informal, violent and peaceful, they shaped the first American colonies of the new United States. A range of responses to the American colonization of the Ohio and Wabash River Valleys may be observed among both participants and observers. As David Andrew Nichols notes in his 2008 study, Red Gentlemen & White Savages<\/em>, \u201cA close survey of federal Indian relations in the Trans-Appalachian West during the 1780s and 1790s reveals \u2026 that white American political leaders were far from united in their support for territorial expansion, and that Native American leaders were not invariably determined to resist it.\u201d[6]<\/a> In this collaboratively researched and authored course project, six brave undergraduate and one resolute graduate student, and I have taken this same period as our frame to explore the competing interests, motivations, expectations, and perspectives of the Native inhabitants and Euro-American newcomers in the Wabash River Valley through computational text analysis. We contend that, in this heterogeneous world of British, Spanish, French, Native, and American communities, disputes over land lay at the heart of most battles – political, legal, and military. The language wrapped around these conflicts also reveal competing definitions of gender roles, race, and class. Miscommunication in inter-ethnic meetings due to varied understandings of metaphorical language contributed to discursive and, later, political power imbalances between Euro- and Native-Americans. In late-eighteenth-century Spanish Upper Louisiana, lexicons of authority highlight shifting conceptions of race and gender. Simultaneously, Euro-American women’s correspondence reveals the ways in which they both subscribed to, and contested, gender norms and ideals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Capt. Jonny, a Shawnee chief, spoke on behalf of the three first mentioned nations in that Country: Brethren! Virginians! you know the other day we were fighting, you desired us to be quiet. we are so. you requested us to observe the councils of our Forefathers and act according to their customs. We people of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"templates\/home-template.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-17","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573,"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17\/revisions\/573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asandersgarcia.humspace.ucla.edu\/courses\/earlyamhistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}