This project has profound implications for the field of Early American history. In the most macro sense, it provides a fresh perspective on how Indians experienced political power and sovereignty in Colonial America. Beginning in the 1970s, the rise of ethnohistorical methods and the “cultural turn” in the humanities caused historians to recognize that Indians had significant roles and heterogenous experiences in Early America. Yet in all but the newest work, Indians simply react to European colonialism. Historians have repeatedly shown how, in the face of overwhelming colonial incursions, Indians are forced to make the unpalatable choice between accommodation and resistance. Whether they choose accommodation, resistance, or (most often) a strategic combination of the two approaches, Indians play a losing game that inevitably ends in defeat. Because they merely respond to colonialism in much of the historical literature, Indians have become trapped in a paradox.
While accommodation and resistance to colonialism were undeniably major facets of the Indian experience in Early America, they were not the sole arenas of indigenous agency. In the late 2000s, Kathleen DuVal and Pekka Hämäläinen were among the first historians to shatter the accommodation-resistance paradox. In The Native Ground (2007), DuVal argues that “Indians of the Arkansas Valley held sovereignty according to both their own and European definitions. They exercised property rights over most of the region’s land and resources and wielded authority over the small amounts of land that Europeans held.” Hämäläinen pushed even further in The Comanche Empire (2008). The Comanches, he claimed, constituted an indigenous empire between 1700 and 1860. Though the Comanches were never a traditional European-style empire, Hämäläinen argues they “built an imperial organization that subdued, exploited, marginalized, co-opted, and profoundly transformed near and distant colonial outposts, thereby reversing the conventional imperial trajectory in vast segments of North and Central America.1 Since the Comanches never actually considered themselves to be an empire, some scholars have criticized this thesis as ahistorical. But Hämäläinen and DuVal made critical contributions that transcended the old paradox and emphasized Native political power, military offensives against colonialism, and proactive defense of territorial sovereignty.
Hämäläinen and DuVal demonstrated that the while accommodation-resistance paradox was undeniably a major facet of the Indian experience in Early America, it was not the sole arena for indigenous agency. The Indians of the Arkansas Valley, the Comanches, and numerous other tribes lived in loose but sophisticated polities that exercised regional hegemony, compelled lesser Indian nations and colonial frontier towns to become tributaries, and sometimes even subjugated their would-be colonizers. Yet with few exceptions, this paradox-shattering lesson has only been heeded by historians studying indigenous peoples in the West. Those studying Algonquins in the Northeast, and particularly the Wabanaki peoples, are rarely in conversation with DuVal and Hämäläinen. This silence underscores a broader limitation in specialist studies of the Wabanaki Confederacy—historians have struggled to put their work in conversation with the larger debates in Indian Studies, including these recent discussions of the significance of indigenous polities in Colonial America. One of the main purposes of this project is to close this gap and shed new light on the People of the Dawn.
Notes
Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 7; and Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 3.
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