Settler Uprising: The Indigenous Origins of the American Revolution

Despite a profusion of scholarship both on Native peoples and on broader processes of settler colonial formation, the “Age of Revolutions” continues to elide the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the making of the United States. Drawing upon a series of studies of the Ohio River Valley, this paper highlights the temporal and spatial limitations in current studies. It argues that the ideologies of settlement in western Pennsylvania powerfully shaped not only the course of Indian-white relations throughout the 1760s but also recast relationships between settler colonists and the British government. Such ideologies were forged partly in response to the rise of interior Indigenous confederacies in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and targeted residential, missionized Indians within colonial society, fostering dialectics of defensive reaction and violent aggression that fueled anti-monarchical sentiment throughout colonial society.