Viewed from a plane, the state of Michigan spreads out like a patchwork quilt — green and tan squares of land stitched together, and demarcated, by roads. My grandparents live in central Michigan on a road that runs parallel to the wide, sand-bottomed river named Chippewa after the Native American tribe. The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe now owns and operates the Soaring Eagle Casino, considered to be the one of the largest casinos in the Midwest. The casino is built on the 217.617 square-mile Isabella Indian Reservation, where my great-great grandmother, part Mohawk, part Dutch, emigrated from Mohawk Valley, New York to live. Sometimes, when I visit my grandparents, we go to the casino, each of us with 20 dollars.Before European colonists divided the land, Native Americans like the Chippewas (also known as the Ojibwa), Cherokees, and Shawnees didn’t “own and operate” land. The first two volumes in the new Penguin Library of American Indian History describe the Cherokees and Shawnees as people who identified with the land; they saw it as both a physical and spiritual environment. The Shawnees, for example, believed that North America was an island supported by a giant sea turtle, floating in a giant body of water. They, along with the animals and the plants, were chosen to inhabit the island by the Great Spirit. Humans, animals, and plants, therefore, all lived in balance. When the Euro-Americans began to settle the same ground in the late 16th and early 17th century, the way Native Americans defined land, and consequently themselves, changed.
Though the Cherokee and Shawnee people were similar in their understanding of their environments, the two tribes exemplify diverse struggles for independence. Where the Cherokees were regarded as complying “Indian” politicians, the Shawnees waged the Sixty Years’ War against those who wanted control of their land and identity. When Americans won their independence from the British in the 18th century, the Cherokees and Shawnees were just two of the Native American tribes that lost their autonomy — in a fight that Colin G. Calloway, author of The Shawnees and the War for America, concludes, “continues as Americans struggle to accommodate visions of America, and of the world.”
The story of the Shawnee Native American Tribe ― with its one-eyed prophet Tenskwatawa, and string of A-list heroes like Cornstalk, Blue Jacket, Black Hoof, and Tecumseh — is a dangerous one, and Calloway tells it in tomahawk-and-skinned-corpse detail. The first missionaries who tried to “civilize” the Shawnee people met with disagreeing counsel. As Shawnee chief Othaawaapeelethee (or Yellow Hawk) explained to Reverend David Jones in 1773, “When God, who first made us all, prescribed our way of living, he allowed white people to live one way, and Indians another.” But when Americans and British alike threatened the Shawnee Ohio-Valley homeland, some Shawnees fought for their freedoms, earning reputations for holding Daniel Boone hostage and scalping settlers, though scalping was a method employed by both natives and the settlers.
In the 60 years the Shawnees waged war, the British “Father’s conduct” was compared by Shawnee war leader Tecumseh to that of “a fat Animal that carries its tail upon its back; but when affrighted, it drops between its legs and runs off.” In 1813, Tecumseh was shot down after British allies deserted the Shawnees in the Battle of the Thames against the Americans. “The vision of a united and independent Indian state east of the Mississippi,” Calloway writes, “died with Tecumseh.” It wasn’t long after Tecumseh’s death that the Indian state east of the Mississippi was virtually removed.
The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, is a story of Native American removal. Though the Cherokees were not the only tribe to undergo a politically charged exodus — treaties between the Chippewas and the United States involving land cessions exceeded dozens — theirs is well-documented: the Cherokee people were more educated than other tribes. Prominent Cherokee leaders John Ross, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot all received boarding-school educations, and thus spoke English. Unlike the Shawnees, the Cherokees agreed to be “civilized.” Boudinot established the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, running stories in both Cherokee and English.With civilization, 19th century Cherokee chief John Ross hoped for independence; he believed in the Declaration. All three ― Ross, Ridge, and Boudinot ― were eventually welcomed into the offices of the American capital. But Andrew Jackson’s presidency, greedy for the Cherokee’s land and gold mines, sought to turn their people out. Perdue and Green explain that the Trail of Tears is both a Cherokee story and an American one. The trail west was forged with political partisanship and racism, and claimed the lives of thousands.
Though impossible to claim a real understanding of Native American History from these two small books, the library, edited by Calloway, is off to a promising start. The question is begged: what if casinos and reservations, were our conciliatory prize? The Shawnees and the War for America and The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears are succinct histories, in a forthcoming library of eight volumes — and they’re a starter course for anybody eager to begin to understand a people, more often than not forgotten.
