Reviewed by Gregory Evans Dowd | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2

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Reviewed by Gregory Evans Dowd | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Gregory Evans Dowd, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. By Kathleen DuVal. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 330 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
This learned, engaging, and often provocative work examines the history of American Indians in the Arkansas River Valley from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. The geographic range is not small, since the valley embraces and unites a substantial portion of the southern Great Plains and the western Southeast. As impressive as the three-century chronological scope is, Kathleen DuVal's brief introduction and conclusion push it wider: they survey the valley's precolonial history and report on the region's Indians today. This, then, is a concise work of great geographic and chronological breadth. Thematically, too, this is a book with reach; its key phrase, "native ground," is a carefully contrived gauntlet thrown down both to honor and to challenge current scholarship.	1
The particular native ground that DuVal describes was an Indian place with diverse peoples, with "its own cores and peripheries, borders and borderlands" (28) well before mounted Christian soldiers clanked into the region from La Florida and Mexico in 1541. DuVal imaginatively reconstructs those Spanish entries, insisting that they were not moments of immediate revolutionary change to peoples who had recently experienced the rise of Mississippian chiefdoms and spectacular contests for power: "Guns and horses were new to the Arkansas Valley, but negotiating with outsiders and adapting to changes were not" (30). Intending to conquer but too uncomprehending to maintain allies and too weakened to dominate, the early Spanish explorers instead faced the only choices acceptable to the dominant peoples of the interior: total incorporation or expulsion. Most chose the latter.	2
Great changes followed the Spanish entradas as the Mississippian societies dispersed and as newcomers from the east (perhaps the Ohio Valley) rose to dominance: first the Quapaw in the eastern valley and then the Osages in the central valley. The histories of these Siouan-speaking peoples from about 1650 to 1828 as well as their relations with French, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Spanish, Caddo, British, Shawnee, Delaware, Cherokee, American, and other neighbors and intruders form the main story of The Native Ground.	3
Closely attending to relations among Indians, DuVal contributes to our understanding of the ways in which Indian diplomacy involved native notions of land use and property. Indian allies often agreed to share resources in their borderlands, a practice that they extended to their European allies and even to the United States. Decentering the colonizers, DuVal informs us about many other matters in the larger narrative of American Indian history. Tecumseh's movement, for example, failed to raise Osage support not because of traditional intertribal animosities but because the United States seemed to pose little threat to Osages who, as of 1812, had found in such empires useful dependents and agents of Osage power. As another example DuVal implicitly questions the centrality of Andrew Jackson and the Democrats to the American story of Indian expulsion. Her work, which ends for the most part in 1828, reveals that the United States of John Quincy Adams had far less interest in the incorporation of outsiders than had the Indian authorities of the native ground.	. . .

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