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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Daniel P. Barr, editor. The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2006. Pp. xix, 261. $52.00.
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| In this sleek work, eleven original essays explore contacts, internal dynamics, and interactions among Europeans, Indians, and Americans in the greater Old Northwest from about 1750 to 1850. Diverse methodologies address spatial relationships, including spatial perceptions. The essays stress sociocultural and ideological intricacies generated via fluctuating political entities and abruptly fluid realities. Sharply contrasting world views, aspirations, and capabilities, underscored by receding British power, operated to scour Indian power and culture from the region. These essays update understandings and blaze new paths. |
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Editor Daniel P. Barr's concise introduction includes sweeping overviews and some historiography and methodology. It also encapsulates each essay. Andrew Cayton, Peter Onuf, Richard White, and others receive homage, and most essayists handle historiography skillfully, offering useful updates and revisions and glimpses of "New Indian" literature. Most essayists respect the era's murky and, at times, spongy and contradictory evidence and refrain from trying to pry too much from it; sensibly, most couch conclusions tentatively. Although some essayists bruise Quakers for obtuseness and decry British bullheadedness, most eschew presentism and try to fathom with empathy activities and understanding on the era's terms, placing healthy emphasis on Indian agency, evolving porous boundaries, and imperfect knowledge. Perhaps essayists Lisa Brooks and Frazer Dorian McGlinchey display the most sophisticated spatial insights. |
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The essays illuminate the actors' cultural baggage and the frequent need to rearrange and even jettison some baggage. They clarify roles of captivity and release, honor and shame, threats and enticements, and resistance and accommodation, as well as multiple and shifting contingencies and often jarring unintended consequences of seemingly inconsequential acts. Throughout, misconceptions, flawed communication, imperfect understandings, clashing visions, irrationalities, and often wobbly decision making surface. Essayists nuance ever-shifting dynamics involving binding policy and rogue elements, political bases and splintered factions, institutions and solitary members, and core constituencies and fringe actors, providing proof of the era's dynamic complexities and uncertainties that influenced human activities in the Old Northwest. Clearly, the region was a vast petri dish of contested possibilities. |
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The work sports solid organization, both chronologically and geographically. The first four essays address Indian-newcomer frictions, intracolonial and intratribal dynamics, and evolving imperial struggles prior to 1776, highlighting the Appalachian region and eastern parts of the Old Northwest during a time when all parties confronted stark new worlds. Highly complex and ultimately insoluble tasks confronting Britain receive sophisticated treatment. The remaining seven essays stress nonmilitary intricacies among various parties from the revolution to the late 1840s, with increasingly isolated Indians facing mounting American pressures as British support evaporated. |
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