Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest

View Inside

368 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 32 halftones, 16 maps, 4 tables

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5916-9
Published: February 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-4058-7
Published: June 2018
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-4059-4
Published: May 2018
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5268-7
Published: May 2018

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Buy this Book

Paperback $35.95
Hardcover $45.00
E-Book $19.99

Amazon Kindle Apple iBookstore Barnes and Noble Ebooks

For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies

To purchase online via an independent bookstore, visit Bookshop.org

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Awards & distinctions

Honorable Mention, 2019 Ray Allen Billington Prize, Organization of American Historians

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking richness. These prosperous Native communities frustrated French and British imperial designs, controlled the Ohio Valley, and confederated when faced with the challenge of American invasion.

By the late eighteenth century, Montreal silversmiths were sending their best work to Wabash Indian villages, Ohio Indian women were setting the fashions for Indigenous clothing, and European visitors were marveling at the sturdy homes and generous hospitality of trading entrepôts such as Miamitown. Confederacy, agrarian abundance, and nascent urbanity were, however, both too much and not enough. Kentucky settlers and American leaders—like George Washington and Henry Knox—coveted Indian lands and targeted the Indian women who worked them. Americans took women and children hostage to coerce male warriors to come to the treaty table to cede their homelands. Appalachian squatters, aspiring land barons, and ambitious generals invaded this settled agrarian world, burned crops, looted towns, and erased evidence of Ohio Indian achievement. This book restores the Ohio River valley as Native space.

About the Author

Susan Sleeper-Smith is professor of history at Michigan State University. She has authored one previous book and edited four essay volumes.
For more information about Susan Sleeper-Smith, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Compelling. . . . Offers a highly readable account of vital women's roles in the widespread Indian settlements of the Ohio River valley."—Journal of American History

"Clearly written, well researched, and intellectually engaging. . . . Not only does the author restore the voices of Indigenous women . . . she also challenges persuasively the master narrative that has justified the excesses of American expansion."—Western Historical Quarterly

"Susan Sleeper-Smith's pioneering research on the fur trade and American Indian women has proved to be . . . influential. Her new book builds on her expertise with impressive interdisciplinary research, evocative writing, and ambitious sweep."—Journal of Southern History

"Long-awaited. . . . Sleeper-Smith's important new work reminds us how much our historical knowledge relies on unexamined non-Native assumptions about Native gender constructions and how very differently Native history appears when Native constructions of gender are employed in their stead."—American Historical Review

"Without question, Sleeper-Smith's contribution to indigenous women's history and regional history during this period remains invaluable. Her archival sources, including archeological data and environmental studies, are expansive. She argues clearly and consistently that indigenous women were pivotal to the prosperity and success of Native communities in the region."—Indiana Magazine of History

"The stakes of Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest are many and its interventions significant. . . . The work to disentangle Indigenous lifeways from explanatory systems imbricated in expansionist policies and colonialist historiography continues, and Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest offers a set of practices that suggests one way forward."—Eighteenth-Century Fiction