Session Abstract

This session aims to reconceptualize politics within Native American societies and in their complex interactions with Euro-Americans. The participants offer new perspectives on Indians as subjects and actors in conflicts over early American governance through the analysis of embodied emotions, legal alterity, and subversive storytelling.  Moving beyond conventional formulations of Indian politics as a struggle between nativists and accommodationists and intercultural politics as “middle ground” diplomacy, the papers explore more nuanced understandings of these hybrid political worlds.  The panel will therefore address not only historians of Native Americans and early America, but scholars interested in the politics of colonialism, borderlands, and state-building more broadly.

Each of the three papers in this panel focuses on one of the 2013 conference’s three themes of “Lives, Places, Stories.” Matthew Kruer addresses “Lives.” His paper explores the parallel but culturally specific histories of trauma that led Susquehannock Indians and Virginia colonists into open war in 1676. He broadens the scope of political history by bridging the private world of emotional experience and the public realm of diplomacy and war, showing that the political selves of both English colonists and Native Americans were constituted by their embodied experiences of violence and dislocation.

Gregory Ablavsky addresses “Places.” His paper argues that the threat of increasing Indian unity and Native adeptness at exploiting state-federal conflicts helped spur the drafting of the Constitution to create a stronger federal government capable of controlling the borderlands. He expands the geographical boundaries of the “constitutional moment” away from Philadelphia, exploring the interrelated projects of constructing nation-states and confederations as contests to construct new “places” of political supremacy.

Finally, Julie Fisher makes “Stories” her centerpiece by examining why rumor became the political weapon of choice for indigenous leaders in seventeenth-century New England. Rather than viewing a rumor as a discrete episode, she argues that many Indian leaders disseminated rumors as a sustained and highly effective political strategy for the better part of the seventeenth century. With the English refusal to engage Native diplomacy in any meaningful way, they found themselves repeatedly vulnerable to the rumors Indians spread. For the men, women, and children of English and Indian communities, the stories they told and the rumors they heard had profound consequences.

By expanding the realm of politics, these three papers invite new approaches to political history that appreciate the complexity of Native American ideas and practices. Each strives to place indigenous and Euro-American politics in dialogue, suggesting new opportunities for fruitful comparison and integrated histories of colonization. To further this goal, the chair and commentator will be Eric Hinderaker, who redefined the nature of empires in North America in Elusive Empires (1997) and explored the impact of Indian politics on the British imaginary in The Two Hendricks (2010).