Title People of the ecotone : environment and indigenous power at the center of Early America / Robert Michael Morrissey

Published Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2022

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Description 1 online resource (xix, 268 pages) : illustrations, maps Series Weyerhaeuser environmental books Weyerhaeuser environmental book. Contents Introduction: Continual Wars and the Place Where They Lived -- One: Shoreline of Grass -- Two: Species Shift -- Three: The Run-Up -- Four: Edge and Wedge -- Five: The Great Bison Acceleration -- Six: Hiding in the Tallgrass -- Seven: War -- Conclusion: Coulipa's Body and the Power of the Ecotone Summary "Measured from the arrival of European colonists to the present day, perhaps no landscape on the planet has changed more radically than the tallgrass prairie peninsula. Better known today for fields of corn and soybeans that stretch across Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, this bioregion was once of the most dynamic ecologies on the continent, a mosaic of forests, wetlands, savannahs, and prairies. It was also a once a major cultural borderland, where the Great Lakes and Plains Indigenous peoples met. Robert Morrissey offers a human and environmental history of this bioregion from the fall of Cahokia (13th-14th century CE) through the mid-18th century, probing the complex rise and fall of the Illinois, the Meskwaki, and the Myaamia peoples, then among the most powerful native peoples in the interior, and perhaps on the continent. Morrissey views their histories through a long-term lens of environmental shifts over millennia, as changes in climate meant shifting bison geographies, and tribes that adapted their cultures to become pedestrian bison hunters.But rather than focusing on an individual tribe, Morrissey centers a dynamic zone. Rather than concentrating on the rupture of colonialism, the book concentrates on events that shaped Indigenous motivations well before first contact, and continued to do so profoundly right through the mid-18th century. Rather than a simple story of natives and newcomers, this book examines processes of encounter and contestation among Indian peoples themselves, a kind of Indigenous métissage and culture-creation in the generations before contact. And rather than French agendas driving momentous violence in the early Midwest, or the invasion of the region by outsiders, this book explores the long Indigenous and material roots of transformational events like the Fox Wars, some of early America's most consequential episodes of violence.Morrissey draws on innovative methods in environmental history, such as pollen analysis, tree rings, material culture, and ecology, and explores themes such as non-human historical agency, climate history, and human-animal relations. The work contributes to conversations in early American history, animal studies, Indigenous studies, the history of violence, and borderlands history. Rooting these events in important biophysical realities and Indigenous logics that colonial archives rarely captured, the book tells a whole new story about Indigenous power in the pre-modern mid-continent"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on November 15, 2022) Subject Indians of North America -- Middle West -- History Illinois Indians -- History Fox Indians -- History Prairie ecology -- Middle West -- History Ecotones -- Middle West -- History Human ecology -- Middle West -- History French -- Middle West -- History HISTORY / Native American Ecotones Fox Indians French Human ecology Illinois Indians Indians of North America Prairie ecology SUBJECT Middle West -- History Subject Middle West Genre/Form Electronic books History Form Electronic book Author Sutter, Paul, writer of foreword. LC no. 2022015079 ISBN 9780295750897 0295750898

Other Titles Environment and indigenous power at the center of Early America

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