| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. By Kathleen DuVal. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. x, 320 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8122-3918-0.)

This first book by the University of North Carolina history professor Kathleen DuVal makes a significant contribution to early American and American Indian history. In an age when "Atlantic" histories increasingly inform the approach and topics of early American history and turn the gaze of historians to Europe and Africa, DuVal reminds us that the heart of North America was a "Native ground" dominated by Indian peoples throughout the era of colonization. Indians, she argues, shaped the region's economics and politics far more than the Spanish, French, British, and, at least initially, American colonists who ventured to the area through the early nineteenth century. DuVal demonstrates that European and American settlers, as well as migrant Indians, adapted to the demands of Indian peoples native to the area and interacted within Native understandings of diplomacy and trade. The author wisely dismisses dependency theory and world-systems approaches that privilege European analytical paradigms and instead centers her study of the midcontinent on Indian people and their motivations. She succeeds in her goal, "to exoticize the Europeans and show how Indians incorporated them into their native-dominated, if contested and unstable, world" (p. 10).

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