Between 1730 and 1758, Shawnee, Delaware, Seneca, and Cayuga refugees settled at Lower Shawnee Town, at the confluence of the Ohio and Scioto rivers. The middle Ohio Valley became a social laboratory in which notions of place, migration, and identity were tested. The Shawnee, in particular, had experienced the full range of colonialism, from an ephemeral middle ground at Fort St. Louis, to the Indian slave trade at Savannah Town, to life among the Iroquois on the Lower Susquehanna River. Each of these geo-temporal contexts required the Shawnee to form multi-ethnic alliances. As a result, Shawnee migrants returned to Ohio a changed people. Lower Shawnee Town marks the return of Shawnee people to Ohio after nearly 6o years of exile. But in those years the Shawnee and their neighbors had become a people of diaspora.
Nevertheless, they were more than feral inheritors of a “new world.” Their long attachment to the Ohio Valley predisposed the Shawnee to a village based world in which achieved status, rather than ascribed hierarchies of power, shaped their identities. The peoples of Lower Shawnee Town did not conform to tribal or national visions of identity. Rather, they were members of clans, they were Shawnees, they were Algonquians, and finally, they were “Ohio Indians.” Placing the peoples of Lower Shawnee Town within these longer histories of migrations away from and to the Ohio River Valley helps to clarify the dominant paradigms of American Indian history, from the “middle ground,” to the “new world,” to the “shatter zone.” This history of Lower Shawnee Town will be used to critique typologies that, used uncritically, often gloss over the range, and complexity, of American Indian lives.
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