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Kathleen DuVal - The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent

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Kathleen DuVal The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent
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In The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them.
Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground 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. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groupsMississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokeesand the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region.
Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the regions inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship.
With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.

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EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES
Daniel K. Richter and Kathleen M. Brown, Series Editors
Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
The Native Ground
Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent
Kathleen DuVal
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DuVal, Kathleen.
The native ground : Indians and colonists in the heart of the continent / Kathleen DuVal.
p. cm.(Early American studies)
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3918-8 (acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8122-3918-0 (acid-free paper)
1. Indians of North AmericaArkansas River ValleyHistory. 2. Indians of North AmericaFirst contact with EuropeansArkansas River Valley. 3. ColonistsArkansas River ValleyHistory. 4. Arkansas River ValleyEthnic relations. 5. Arkansas River ValleyHistory. I. Title. II. Series.
E78.A8D88 2006
976.7'300497dc22 2005058589
to My Family
Illustrations
Figures
Maps
Introduction
In the summer of 1673, a Quapaw Indian spotted two canoes full of Frenchmen descending the broad, brown waterway that Algonquian speakers named the Mississippi, the Big River. When the people of Kappa, the northernmost Quapaw town, heard the news, they prepared to welcome the newcomers. Several Quapaws paddled their own canoes into the river, and one held aloft a calumet, a peace pipe. As the Quapaws hoped, this sign of peaceful intentions, recognized by native peoples across North America, allayed the fears of their French visitorsQuebec merchant Louis Jolliet, Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette, and their handful of companions. As his canoe pulled up beside the Frenchmen, the man holding the calumet sang a song of welcome. He handed them the pipe, with some cornbread and sagamit, corn porridge. After the visitors had smoked and eaten, the Quapaws led them to Kappa, on the banks of the Mississippi some twenty-five miles north of the mouth of the Arkansas River. There, under persimmon and plum trees, the women prepared a place for the visitors to sit among the town's elders, on fine rush mats, surrounded by the warriors. The rest of the men and women of Kappa sat in an outer circle. One of the young men of the town translated for Marquette through an Algonquian language that both of them knew.
The Quapaws message was clear. They wanted an alliance with the French. From neighbors to the east, the Quapaws had learned of Europeans and the powerful munitions that they traded and gave to their Indian allies. But, as the Quapaw elders explained to their visitors, enemies had prevented them from becoming acquainted with the Europeans, and from carrying on any trade with them. The Quapaws hoped that Jolliet and Marquette would be the first of many French visitors who would prove steady allies and provide useful goods.
The Quapaws were purposefully shaping the newcomers understandings of the North American mid-continent and the people who lived there. While the Quapaws demonstrated that they were generous and friendly, they portrayed their enemies as aggressive and dangerous. When the visitors mentioned that they intended to continue following the Mississippi to the sea, the Quapaws knew that such a trip would give their rivals, the Tunicas, Yazoos, and Koroas, the opportunity to influence French perceptions and to forge their own exclusive alliance with the visitors. Therefore, the Quapaws warned their guests that the trip would be extremely dangerous because the Indians to the south had guns and were very warlike. Swayed by the warning, Jolliet and Marquette turned back toward Canada, where they would convey the Quapaws description of the remainder of the route to the Gulf of Mexico, without having seen it themselves.
Map 1 The heart of the continent While Jolliet and Marquette believed that - photo 1
Map 1. The heart of the continent.
While Jolliet and Marquette believed that they were establishing contact with the native people of this region, the Quapaws situation was a bit more complicated than they revealed. They were particularly interested in shaping French impressions of and involvement in the region because they themselves had only recently settled there. Apparently, some decades earlier, Iroquoian-speakers had used Dutch weapons to raid Indians to their west, compelling several Dhegiha Siouan peoplesthe Quapaws, Osages, Omahas, Poncas, and Kansasto move west of the Mississippi River. Most had headed northwest from the mouth of the Ohio, but the Quapaws had settled farther south, near the juncture of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers. Here, they faced new challenges from native peoples with longer histories in the region who contested the Quapaws right to be there. The Tunicas, Yazoos, and Koroas to the south and Caddoan-speaking peoples to the west attacked the newcomers for positioning themselves in territory that the older residents still considered their own. Surrounded by rivals, the Quapaws had no access to the English and Dutch arms trade in the East or the Spanish posts in the West and saw the French visitors as their opportunity to shift local power relations in their favor.
* * *
The meeting between the Quapaws and this French party was only one of countless encounters wherein one people attempted to shape another's interpretation of the mid-continent, the region along the central Mississippi River and its western tributaries, the Missouri, St. Francis, White, Arkansas, Ouachita, and Red Rivers. This book particularly centers on the Arkansas River Valley because of its sustained Indian and European diversity. This complicated and contested region experienced waves of successive migrations of Indians and Europeans, from millennia B.C. through the early nineteenth century. At various times, Mississippian chiefdoms, a variety of Caddoan-speakers, Illinois peoples, Quapaws, Osages, Shawnees, Miamis, and Cherokees called the Arkansas Valley home. France, Spain, Britain, and the United States all attempted to make the region and its peoples part of their empires. Surrounded by numerous and changing potential allies and enemies, the various peoples of the region confronted a constant problem in trying to establish a stable set of relations that would secure their rights to live, hunt, farm, and trade in the heart of the continent.
In their negotiations, Indians and Europeans alike sought to control the culture of diplomacy and trade and to define themselves and others in ways that forwarded their own interests. Both Indians and Europeans purposefully constructed and advanced notions of us and them, but these categories were never as simple as Indians and Europeans. Because their lives and livelihoods depended on making distinctions, all were mindful of the differences between, for example, the French and the English, and the Osages and the Shawnees. When new Indians or Europeans arrived, they found themselves recruited by those already there, who sought to teach newcomers their interpretation of the history, customs, and peoples of the region. Which people's vision prevailed depended on their powers of persuasionverbal, economic, and military.
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