At the end of the French and Indian War the British created the Indian Reserve out of new lands ceded by the defeated French and created an artificial boundary with the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Within a generation the new United States would designate the northern portion of that reserve as the Northwest Territory from lands ceded by the defeated British and defined by the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. The central intent of both nations in defining and implementing these political boundaries was the management of trade and the orderly regulation of expansion and settlement. In both instances the leaders of the Native American peoples living within these regions were essentially ignored in the diplomatic decision-making that bounded and parceled lands that included both their ancient homelands and newly settled, amalgamated Indian communities.
During this same period, Native American leaders and communities within Indian Country expressed new ways of organizing their settlements and asserting their collective identity in order to preserve and define the boundaries of the homelands they never ceded. Throughout this era the Delawares, Shawnees, Miamis and Potawatomis expressed both complimentary and competing ideas about how these lands would be occupied, shared and governed. The political responses of community leaders to these changes were varied, but expressed similar trends: the centralization of authority, the election of leaders through new paths of power rather than traditional methods of election and the imagining of a single Indian nation. In this presentation I will present a study of two native communities in the Old Northwest Territory who responded to the new United States with a vision of their own Indian nation.
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