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
groups-Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and
Cherokees-and 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
region's 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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