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.
