by David Treuer
The tribes to the west of the Iroquois were numerous and powerful but spread out over a vast territory. They included the Shawnee, Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Sac, Fox, Menominee, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Osage, Miami, Dakota, Cree, Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, and Huron (to name but a few). With the exception of the Huron, who lived in large agricultural settlements on the north side of Lake Ontario and later near Georgian Bay and whose population numbered 20,000 to 40,000 or more, western Great Lakes tribes were broken into small mobile villages of around 150 to 300 people, organized by kinship ties. These were the Indians of storybook legend: plying the vast woodlands in birchbark canoes and treading the hushed forests in moccasins. They were primarily hunter-gatherers, though they, too, grew corn, beans, and squash. More westerly tribes such as the Ojibwe had also begun harvesting and cultivating naturally occurring wild rice—a swampy aquatic plant in the oat family that provided a very stable and nutrient-rich food source.
In 1608, Samuel de Champlain (the “father of New France”) pushed deeper into the Saint Lawrence and landed at the site that would become Quebec. As historian Michael McDonnell notes, Quebec was less a colony of settlement than the site of a warehouse and trading factory. Trading posts or factories—which in no way resembled factories as we know them—were combination free-trade zones, consulates, military garrisons, and settlements. European and American goods would be brought there, while Indian trade goods (usually furs and buckskin) were brought from the interior. The factory would be run by a “factor,” essentially a trader, and staffed with other traders who worked under him, along with craftsmen with needed skills, such as blacksmiths and tanners.
The hope at Quebec was to catch furs coming out of the northland and thereby bypass the British to the east and the Spanish creeping up the Mississippi from the south. The French mode of settlement was for Indians in many ways preferable to that of the British and the Spanish. Instead of following a pattern of conquest, subjugation, settlement, and displacement, the French, preferring to trade rather than to settle, were much more inclined to adapt to the new country and its inhabitants. The new outpost was deep in Indian country, and to survive it needed the help of its neighbors. The French began trading with the Huron: metal goods and guns in exchange for stores of surplus corn. The Huron maintained good trade relations with their Algonquian neighbors, the Odawa and Ojibwe, so that, while they themselves did not have access to furs, they had access to and good relations with those who did. A year after Champlain landed at Quebec, the Huron were trading with the French vigorously, then trading with the Odawa and Ojibwe in turn. It wasn’t long, however, before Champlain recognized that in order to get premium northern furs (and at a better price), he had to deal directly with the Odawa and Ojibwe.
As they say: Location, location, location. At this time the Odawa and Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) were located around Michilimackinac, which sat at the straits that separated Lake Michigan from Lake Huron, a day’s paddle from the outlet of Lake Superior and perhaps the most strategically important location in North America at that time. Control the straits and you controlled travel and trade for the majority of the continent. The location also suited the cultural prerogatives of kinship unique to the Algonquians of the region: they were principally exogamous and had a very well developed clan system. Children took the clan of their fathers and typically married out of their village into nearby villages and even other tribes. The son would move out of his family’s home and into that of his wife, bringing with him his clan and sense of relatedness. As a result, “family” became a large thing indeed and pulled populations of mobile and separate tribes into incredibly durable and mutually beneficial relationships over great distances. This well-woven network was an incredible boon in times of war and matters of trade. Moreover, Michilimackinac offered access to reliable food sources. The lakes in all directions mitigated the effects of latitude with a microclimate that allowed for corn production well north of its usual limit and supported an incredible diversity of plants and trees. Ash, oak, maple, elm, spruce, cedar, and white pine grew in profusion. The fall spawn of whitefish was said to be so intense that one could walk across the straits on the backs of the spawning fish. Villages tended to be seasonal and small—groups of usually no more than 150 relatives who lived in largely single-family wigwams, made from saplings driven into the ground and bent and tied together into a dome shape, then covered with woven reeds, cedar bark, birchbark shingles, or elm bark. These populations shifted between winter hunting grounds, spring fishing sites, sugar bush, and summer berrying locations. In summer, when insects were at their worst, villages shifted to high bluffs or rocky promontories to catch the breeze. In winter, when temperatures dropped below zero, as in the Northeast, families often consolidated into larger oblong wigwams or lodges to conserve resources and heat.
In this way the Great Lakes Indians made the most of their homelands in the heart of the heartland. They also had the benefit of timing: they were there at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the fur trade blossomed into the first—and for centuries the most important—global industry. Their strong position allowed the allied Anishinaabe tribes (Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi) to pressure the French to supply more than trade goods if they were going to be suffered to stay in the Pays d’en Haut. In 1609, they coerced the French into joining them in war parties against the Iroquois Confederacy, who were a constant threat on the southeastern flank of the Great Lakes. And so began a well-regulated pattern of trade.
By the late seventeenth century the Anishinaabe allowed the French to build forts and trading posts as far north and west as Michilimackinac itself, sustaining a seasonal cycle of trade in Indian lands. The French followed Ojibwe and Odawa trade terms and their cultural protocols for feasting and gift-giving. When they failed to comply or tried to dictate new terms, the Anishinaabe would court the British and trade with them until the French fell back in line. With such leverage, the fate of the Great Lakes Indians came to differ radically from that of Indians in tribal homelands everywhere else in North America. Even during the French and British conquest of the Great Lakes, and disease notwithstanding, the population of Algonquian tribes such as the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi boomed, quadrupling between 1600 and 1800. The land base of the northern Algonquians expanded by a factor of twenty. Material culture, arts, and religion flourished. The strategic alliances and balance of power that inspired this “golden age” were nowhere more in evidence than in the attack at Pickawillany in 1752.
The French, after early successes in the seventeenth century, had been losing (globally and in North America) to the British. Piankashaw chief Memeskia, having grown dissatisfied with French trade goods and the French themselves, formed an intertribal coalition and began attacking the French. Many disaffected bands and individuals joined him. They formed a village at Pickawillany (at present-day Piqua, Ohio). They welcomed the British and allowed them to build a garrison and trading post nearby. Memeskia was becoming formidable, and his pan-Indian alliances threatened the balance among European powers so crucial to continued Indian control of the Great Lakes. If the British and French were kept wrong-footed, neither could consolidate their power and expand. With that in mind, the Anishinaabe played to their strengths and engaged in some furious diplomacy with their allies and their enemies. They warned the British that they were going to attack them in a general war. And they traveled from Michilimackinac by canoe to meet with the Onondaga Iroquois far to the east. The Iroquois Confederacy claimed the land in Ohio as their own, but they were in a tough place: they were allied with the British, and the British were trading and working with Memeskia. They gave the Algonquians their tacit blessing to remove Memeskia and his people, saying that they would “not permit any Nation to establish posts there; the Master of Life has placed us on that territory, and we alone ought to enjoy it, without anybody having the power to trouble us there.” In other words, they would not clear out the offenders, but they gave the Algonquians leave to
do so.
In the winter of 1751–1752, Charles Langlade, a young mixed-race Odawa-French leader, began assembling a war party of Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe warriors who traveled by canoe south to Detroit and then upriver and over land to Pickawillany. They attacked the village in mid-morning on June 21, 1752, when the women were in the fields, and killed thirteen Miami men and captured five English traders. The survivors of the first assault fled back to a rough stockade, where Langlade and the Anishinaabe warriors fired on them for the better part of the day. Eventually the Miami, down to twenty or so warriors and low on water, tried to negotiate terms of surrender. Langlade said he wanted submission, not defeat, and said the survivors could leave if they promised to return home and if they handed over the English. The Miami failed, however, to honor the agreement, sending out only three of the five Englishmen. When they reached Langlade’s lines his men set on one of them, “stabbed him to death, scalped him, and ripped his heart out. They ate it in front of the defenders.” Then they seized Memeskia himself. They ordered the remaining defenders to stand and watch as they “killed, boiled, and ate Memeskia in front of his family and kinsmen.” Afterward, they released the Miami women they had captured and left for Detroit with the four captured Englishmen and more than $300,000 (in today’s money) of trade goods. This frontier victory against the English set off the First Anglo-Indian War, helped to ignite the French and Indian War, and was one of the sparks that began the worldwide conflagration known as the Seven Years’ War.
Whatever balance had been reestablished between the French and British in this region was lost during the Seven Years’ War, after which, for all intents and purposes, the French ceased to be a force in the New World. This left the British, who could be played off against the colonists only until the Revolutionary War, after which the Americans remained the sole colonial force in the Great Lakes region. This was the worst possible outcome for the Indians there. With the fur trade drawing to a close (by the mid-1800s the beaver was extinct east of the Mississippi), the Americans were free to force Great Lakes tribes into punitive treaties that reduced their territories, confined many to reservations, relocated others to Indian Territory (in what is now Oklahoma), and further eroded Indian influence. But while it lasted, the power of the Great Lakes tribes was immense, if underacknowledged. In part this is because these tribes, while they killed many French and English, didn’t engage in outright war with the new Americans. The cultural habit of negotiation (even from positions of relative powerlessness) persisted through the treaty period of 1830–1865. For this reason, as of 1891, Odawa, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Meskwaki, and Ojibwe tribes remained in their homelands around the Great Lakes in the same geographical range they had at the height of their power.
The Southwest
It is tempting to think of the Southwest of a piece—generically hot, arid, and rocky (if blessed with some stunning views). In reality the area between western Texas and eastern California, bounded by the Rio Grande to the south and the Cimarron River in the north (comprising the land from present-day Needles, California, east through Arizona, New Mexico, southern Nevada and Utah, to far-west Texas and Oklahoma, and including southern Colorado and southwest Kansas) is not an environment as much as a collection of radically different landscapes that supported four major prehistoric cultures and are the homelands, still, of a radical diversity of modern tribal people.
Around 2,300 years ago a small band of wanderers traveled north through the Sonoran Desert and settled on the Gila River, about thirty miles from modern-day Phoenix. They built small single-family dwellings of branches and mud and promptly began digging canals that siphoned off the river a few miles upstream. They planted the seeds they had most likely brought with them. The canals they dug would be in use for more than a thousand years. These were people who knew what they were doing. This first village is known as Snaketown because of the preponderance of those creatures and their images in the artifacts found there. The village grew (some estimates suggest its population swelled to as much as two thousand), and other satellite villages grew up near it, connecting their own canals with Snaketown’s until, within a couple hundred years, the entire flatlands between the Gila and Salt Rivers were laced with them, providing irrigation to upward of a hundred thousand acres, on which they grew corn, cotton, tepary, sieva, jack beans, warty squash, and agave. The Hohokam, as the people were called, were master cultivators and seem to be the first not to simply harvest agave but to cultivate it on unirrigated ground to supplement their wetter crops. Contrary to the myth of the desert as more or less “the great empty,” it was a homeland that supported an incredible number of species, including sixty mammal species (mule deer, bears, jaguars, jackrabbits, cottontails, ground squirrels, wolves, gray fox, and javelina among them), three hundred fifty bird species, twenty different amphibians, more than a hundred reptile species, thirty native fish, at least two thousand plant species, and, rather shockingly, a thousand different species of bees. By 750 CE the Hohokam peoples had evolved cultures that created incredibly ornate pottery, ever more complex ceremonies, and ball courts half the size of football fields next to their ever higher ceremonial structures, which were indeed not unlike the football stadiums and churches that would rise up in the American heartland some twelve hundred years later. But just as quickly as it arose, the Hohokam culture fell. Around 1450 CE, Snaketown was possibly burned and then abandoned, and other major Hohokam sites were abandoned as well. It is unclear why—warfare? drought? disease?—but the Hohokam scattered into small bands and found new lands and new ways of life. According to oral tradition, they became the Tohono O’odham (People of the Desert) and the Akimel O’odham (People of the River) in the region that is now Arizona. The O’odham were variously at odds with the Apache and other regional tribes but suffered the most under Spanish rule, beginning in the sixteenth century.
The prehistoric Mogollon culture of southern Arizona and New Mexico and much of northern Mexico was another ancient society that emerged from the desert, as foragers and hunters transformed into agrarians. The earliest Mogollon villages were small hamlets clustered in the mountainous region on what is now the Arizona–New Mexico border. At first they comprised a handful of pit houses—dwellings dug into the ground and roofed at ground level with beams, branches, and earth. With the region’s much greater precipitation than the Sonoran Desert, less energy needed to be expended on irrigation. As food security increased through agriculture, so did the material and architectural culture of the Mogollon. Some evidence suggests that this borderland between deserts became a kind of multicultural zone, with early Indians arriving in traveling bands from the east, south, and west. After half a millennium, the pit houses gave way to freestanding structures of earth and adobe and, later, complex fortified cliff dwellings like those found at Cueva de las Ventanas. A subset of the Mogollon culture, known as Mimbres, seems to have evolved vibrant ceremonial traditions, as evidenced by the remains of a unique (and arguably the most beautiful) pottery tradition, typified by striking black-on-white geometric and animal shapes, including hummingbirds, fish, snakes, and other flora and fauna of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. But around 1400 CE, like the Hohokam, the Mogollon culture vanished, although the people certainly did not. Villages were burned or abandoned. Cliff dwellings were no longer occupied. The western Pueblo (Zuni and Acoma) as well as the Hopi trace their ancestry to the Mogollon.
The most dramatic of the prehistoric southwestern “supercultures” was probably that of the Anasazi, whose homeland was the Four Corners area of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, a rocky, canyon-scoured landscape of indescribable beauty. “Anasazi” is a Diné (Navajo) word meaning “Enemies of the Old Ones,” though apart from the fact that the word is anglicized and should more properly be spelled and pronounced “Násaazí” and given a more nuanced translation, as a name it makes no sense: the Diné came on the scene only after the fall of the Anasazi. The Hopi name for the Ana
sazi, Hisatsinom, means “Ancestors,” and the Diné name makes greater sense as a reflection of the longstanding friction between the two groups.
The Násaazí started out much like the Hohokam and Mogollon, as hunter-gatherers who, probably because they ate up all the available game and were introduced to domesticated crops from the south, began farming intensively. By 300 CE the advent of pottery meant better food and seed storage and this in turn fueled an agricultural revolution. In typical immigrant fashion, modest dwellings (pit houses) gave way to what can be seen as a prehistoric middle-class way of life, with complex adobe structures of interconnected rooms accessed by ladders dropped down from roofs. At Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and Bandelier, the Násaazí began work on what would become known as the “stone palaces,” great houses that could hold more than five thousand people (though they probably never held more than two thousand at any one time except during large gatherings, most of the rooms being given over to food storage). These rooms were carved out of the rock under overhanging cliffs that offered protection from the weather and from enemies. These multistory palaces, still solid to this day, were also incredibly advanced in terms of ecological engineering. A set of multistory dwellings in Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito, has been deemed “one of the cleverest bits of passive solar architecture anywhere,” with efficiency unsurpassed by modern methods. From Chaco Canyon, raised roads of rock thirty feet wide extended hundreds of miles in fanatically straight lines, linking remote villages and agricultural sites. Yet by 1400 CE or so, these beautiful and sophisticated dwellings were abandoned as well. Chaco was abandoned first, in the wake of an extreme drought that struck around 1100; it was followed by Mesa Verde and Bandelier and Pecos Pueblo near Santa Fe. The Násaazí people took what they could carry and migrated along the rivers, settling closer to what water remained and forming the basis for present-day Pueblo peoples including the Hopi, Cochiti, Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and Taos.
