As soon as Europeans
arrived in North America, they planted flags and boldly claimed possession of
vast swathes of territory. Over the next several centuries they imagined that
the few towns they set up, some scattered missions and outposts, and the
travels of some trappers and traders amounted to sovereignty. In their eyes,
small in number though they often were, they took the lead parts in a grand,
world-historical drama about the winning of a new continent; the bit parts, the
non-speaking parts, belonged to Indigenous people. That was not the reality. For
centuries the crucial decisions were not made by the Europeans but by Indigenous
leaders and the most fateful events took place not in London, Paris, or Quebec,
but in “the woods.”
In the usual
narrative, First Nations appear dimly in the background, brought into focus
only when they impinge directly upon European ambitions—raiding colonists,
fighting as allies in inter-European conflicts, signing treaties, ceding lands.
Modern research, however, is revealing that First Nations were clearly dominant
in North America from the first arrival of the Europeans until nearly the nineteenth
century, after the American War of Independence. Until then the newcomers were
utterly dependent on the good graces of the original inhabitants. And
historians now understand that, far from fighting as auxiliaries for the French
or English, when First Nations stood in battle beside European armies, they did
so with their own agendas— agendas that had much to do with managing Indigenous
tensions and little to do with wanting final victory for either of the European
powers. The geopolitics of the region was settled around council fires, where
rivalries and alliances among First Nations predominated over relations with
the colonial powers.
Michael McDonnell’s Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians
and the Making of America is an important contribution to Indigenous-oriented scholarship. Not
only does it present the history of the Great Lakes region by “looking east,”
it also reveals that the key players were not the nations of the lower Great
Lakes, such as the
Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) or the Huron (Wendat), but a subgroup of the
Anishinaabeg, the Ottawa (Odawa) living at the Straits of Michilimackinac where
Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. Much undervalued by historians, theirs is
shown to be the preeminent influence both on other First Nations and on the
European powers. It derived partly from their strategic location in the Great
Lakes system, a key point in the fur trade, giving them control over
connections between the lower and upper lakes as well as access to the
Mississippi Valley and the western plains; but also decisive was the tradition
of their women marrying outside the group, creating a dense and extensive web
of family connections stretching from Green Bay to the St. Lawrence, easily
activated into alliances.
The
title Masters of Empire is not a tribute to this network, to a
European-style “empire” run by the Michilimackinac Odawa, but to their
achievement in managing the nascent French and English empires. In the early
period, the new neighbours, the French, were by no means uppermost in the minds
of the Odawa. Some traders and a few military personnel were allowed to reside
at Michilimackinac and voyageurs were
allowed to travel through the region, but the Odawa controlled the newcomers easily
through negotiations. The focus of the Odawa was on hunting, cultivating crops,
overseeing their extensive trading relationships, and keeping abreast of
political developments among other Indigenous peoples. The French were accepted
in small numbers because in exchange for furs they provided valuable trade
goods, such as cloth, metal cooking utensils, guns, and ammunition; but the
grave decisions at Michilimackinac concerned other First Nations, especially Iroquois
threats from the east, Fox and Sioux threats from the west, and Catawba incursions
to the south. When the French lost their empire, the Odawa found the English more
difficult to deal with—haughty and expansionist—so they set about checking
English power, aiming to reduce them to fur traders. Only after America became an
independent nation and settlers poured over the Appalachians by the thousands,
backed by large armies, did outsiders become an existential threat. Even then,
however, clever negotiating enabled the Odawa of Michilimackinac to avoid the
fate of many other First Nations—being forcibly removed to distant lands.
A
recurring theme of Masters of Empire
is how events in the backwoods of North America often had repercussions around
the world. Although France and England had long been rivals in the New World,
their final struggle for supremacy in the Seven Years War began with an effort
by Odawa and Ojibwe warriors to rebalance the influence of the two colonial powers,
destabilized by recent British advances. Their successful attack on a British
fort at Pickawillany in the Ohio Valley, unanswered by any English move,
emboldened the French to reassert themselves south of the Great Lakes and
spurred First Nations to send raiding parties to remove British settlers from
traditional lands. A chain of reactions broadened into a global war between
coalitions led by the French and British. Every European great power of the
time, except the Ottoman Empire, joined in, and the fighting spread from North
America to Europe, West Africa, the West Indies, India, and the Philippines.
At
the end of the Seven Years War, First Nations were furious to learn that the
French “gave away” their land to the British, and they launched a war against
the British to establish that they were the masters in their own land. McDonnell
calls it “the first war for American independence in North America.” So
effective were they that finally the British promised to ban settlements west
of the Appalachians, a move welcomed by First Nations but decried by the
American colonies. Then Britain, alarmed at the drain on its treasury resulting
from so many wars, decided to offset its costs by taxing the American
colonists, thus laying the groundwork for the American War of Independence.
Master
of Empire
is academic history, offering only moderate concessions to the general reader
in terms of prose style and narrative structure. However, its Indigenous
perspective easily compensates us for our effort, making us re-think some of
what we long took for granted and, like an infrared image of a familiar scene,
making the familiar seem unfamiliar again.review --
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