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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Stephen Warren. The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 217. $35.00.
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| In 1866, members of the Shawnee National Council recorded their version of Shawnee history, a narrative of unity, rupture, and reunion. According to them, the once-cohesive Shawnee tribe had been dispersed by colonization and U.S. expansion. But in recent decades, Shawnees had reassembled west of the Mississippi River and had made "the council fires complete after centuries of separation" (p. 169). Other Shawnees held a quite different view of their past. In their version, Shawnees had always been peoples of villages, led by their local hereditary chiefs and allied both with other Shawnees and with non-Shawnees. Only in recent decades, many believed, had a group of men calling themselves the Shawnee National Council tried to usurp the traditional power of village chiefs, against the will of the Shawnee people. |
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Stephen Warren traces Shawnee dispersals and disputes from the 1790s Ohio Valley through Indian Territory in the 1860s. Although the introduction sets up the book's argument as a counter to long-debunked nineteenth-century Turnerian views of the west, in fact this book is an important and insightful contribution to recent scholarship on changes and continuities in American Indian identities. By going several decades beyond when most histories of Ohio Valley Indians stop, Warren reveals the complicated disputes over Shawnee identity and governance and the abiding Shawnee resistance to centralization. In Warren's narrative, whether Shawnees were unified before the 1600s or not, by the 1800s their internal divisions and external alliances made creating (or recreating) a single Shawnee tribe impossible. |
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