Peoples of the Inland Sea

I am pleased to announce the publication of my third book, Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 (Ohio University Press, 2018).

In writing Peoples of the Inland Sea I set myself an ambitious task: to chronicle the history of Native Americans in the Great Lakes region over a quarter of a millennium, from European contact to the Industrial Revolution. What made this manageable, and I think makes the book enjoyable for readers, is the commonality of experiences shared by the Great Lakes Indians, by the Dakotas and Delawares, Ho-Chunks and Illiniwek, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, and Menominees, Miamis, Odawas, and Ojibwas, Potawatomis, Shawnees, and Wyandots. Like another great inland sea, the Mediterranean, the Great Lakes drew the indigenous peoples who lived on its shores and plied its waters into an extended community. 

Native Americans in the region traded with one another, shared hunting ranges and fisheries, married into one another’s families, and built multi-ethnic communities like Auglaize, Kekionga, and Michilimackinac. Men and women wove commercial and family connections throughout the Lakes country, a network of relationships that also became conduits for religious and political ideas. Indigenous “nativism,” the idea that all Indians had been created as a single race by the Master of Life and owned Great Turtle Island (North America) in common, grew from the teachings of Lakes Indian prophets like Neolin and Tenskwatawa, and gained its earliest converts from the shorelands of the Inland Sea. Pan-Indian unionism, the unification of diverse Native American nations into a single political movement, also had some of its most memorable

victories here. Over more than a century, Lakes Indian nations formed regional military alliances against Iroquois raiders, arrogant British soldiers, and land-hungry American settlers. In the 1780s and ‘90s, one of these alliances, the United Indians, challenged and nearly defeated the newly-independent United States. As late as 1810 Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s construction of a multi-ethnic Indian nation-state terrified American officials in Washington. The War of 1812 brought military defeat for the unionists, but the Lakes Indians’ long struggle for cultural survival, to preserve their languages, traditional subsistence economy, family structures, and communal festivals, continued. This, too, was a common endeavor, which all Native peoples undertook even in the face of dispossession and Removal.

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The publisher's webpage has more information, including a link to a short podcast by Zoe Bossiere. I also had the pleasure of talking about Peoples with Julie Rose on her show Top of Mind, broadcast on BYU Radio on July 6. The program can be found here.

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(Second image above is George Winter's "Scene on the Wabash " [1848], via Wikimedia Commons. The portrait of Tenskwatawa is from the National Park Service. First photo is by the author.)