People of the Ecotone : Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America

Robert Michael Morrissey

ISBN 10: 0295750871 / ISBN 13: 9780295750873

Published by University Of Washington Press Nov 2022, 2022

About this Item

Neuware - 'Measured from the arrival of European colonists to the present day, perhaps no landscape on the planet has changed more radically than the tallgrass prairie peninsula. Better known today for fields of corn and soybeans that stretch across Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, this bioregion was once of the most dynamic ecologies on the continent, a mosaic of forests, wetlands, savannahs, and prairies. It was also a once a major cultural borderland, where the Great Lakes and Plains Indigenous peoples met. Robert Morrissey offers a human and environmental history of this bioregion from the fall of Cahokia (13th-14th century CE) through the mid-18th century, probing the complex rise and fall of the Illinois, the Meskwaki, and the Myaamia peoples, then among the most powerful native peoples in the interior, and perhaps on the continent. Morrissey views their histories through a long-term lens of environmental shifts over millennia, as changes in climate meant shifting bison geographies, and tribes that adapted their cultures to become pedestrian bison hunters.But rather than focusing on an individual tribe, Morrissey centers a dynamic zone. Rather than concentrating on the rupture of colonialism, the book concentrates on events that shaped Indigenous motivations well before first contact, and continued to do so profoundly right through the mid-18th century. Rather than a simple story of natives and newcomers, this book examines processes of encounter and contestation among Indian peoples themselves, a kind of Indigenous mâetissage and culture-creation in the generations before contact. And rather than French agendas driving momentous violence in the early Midwest, or the invasion of the region by outsiders, this book explores the long Indigenous and material roots of transformational events like the Fox Wars, some of early America's most consequential episodes of violence.Morrissey draws on innovative methods in environmental history, such as pollen analysis, tree rings, material culture, and ecology, and explores themes such as non-human historical agency, climate history, and human-animal relations. The work contributes to conversations in early American history, animal studies, Indigenous studies, the history of violence, and borderlands history. Rooting these events in important biophysical realities and Indigenous logics that colonial archives rarely captured, the book tells a whole new story about Indigenous power in the pre-modern mid-continent'.

Seller Inventory # 9780295750873

Bibliographic Details

• Title: People of the Ecotone : Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America
• Publisher: University Of Washington Press Nov 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295750871
• ISBN 13: 9780295750873
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 229W x 152H x 0D millimeters 229 millimeters width by 152 millimeters height by 0 millimeters depth
• Weight: 606 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the 2023 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize for best book in western environmental history from the Western History Association

Indigenous power in a significant cultural and ecological borderland

In People of the Ecotone, Robert Morrissey weaves together a history of Native peoples with a history of an ecotone to tell a new story about the roots of the Fox Wars, among the most transformative and misunderstood events of early American history. To do this, he also offers the first comprehensive environmental history of some of North America’s most radically transformed landscapes―the former tallgrass prairies―in the period before they became the monocultural “corn belt” we know today.

Morrissey situates the complex rise and fall of the Illinois, Meskwaki, and Myaamia peoples from roughly the collapse of Cahokia (thirteenth to fourteenth century CE) to the mid-eighteenth century in the context of millennia-long environmental shifts, as changes to the climate shifted bison geographies and tribes adapted their cultures to become pedestrian bison hunters. Tracing dynamic chains of causation from microscopic viruses to massive forces of climate, from the deep time of evolution to the specific events of human lifetimes, from local Illinois village economies to market forces an ocean away, People of the Ecotone offers new insight on Indigenous power and Indigenous logics.

About the Author

Robert Michael Morrissey is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois. He is author of Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country.