This panel reframes the history of the Great Lakes from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries by centering Indigenous power in the making of imperial space, colonial policy, and borderlands. Rather than treating French, British, and American expansion as linear processes imposed upon the region, the papers demonstrate how Anishinaabe, Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Wyandotte, and other Indigenous nations shaped the spatial imagination, diplomatic strategies, and territorial boundaries of competing empires.

Alanna Loucks examines French cartography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explore how imperial geographies were constructed. Drawing on maps produced in Paris from information transmitted by missionaries, explorers, and administrators, she reveals how imperial representations of the Great Lakes reflected selective knowledge, metropolitan ambitions, and negotiations with Indigenous realities. French maps projected claims onto a region dominated by autonomous Indigenous nations, producing layered and often fictive images of control.

Guillaume Teasdale turns to the Huron conspiracy of 1747 to argue that Indigenous political pressure directly reshaped French colonial strategy at Detroit. While historians have emphasized Pontiac’s War as a turning point in British policy, this paper shows that earlier Indigenous challenges prompted French officials to recalibrate their approach. Through military correspondence, Teasdale demonstrates how French authorities responded to Huron maneuvering by sponsoring settler convoys in 1748–1749, using demographic expansion as a diplomatic strategy to reinforce alliances and project authority.

Jonathan Quint extends the story into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reconceptualizing the Detroit River region as a tripartite borderland shaped by Indigenous, British, and American power. Anishinaabe and Wyandotte communities regulated land access, patrolled boundaries, and constrained imperial ambitions, ensuring that the U.S.–British border was never simply imposed from above. The making of the Detroit River borderland was instead a negotiated process embedded in Indigenous territorial authority.

Together, these papers challenge narratives of unilateral imperial dominance and top-down border formation. By foregrounding Indigenous agency across regimes—from French mapping to British diplomacy to American expansion—the panel highlights the Great Lakes as an Indigenous geopolitical space in which empires operated contingently. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing historiographical conversations about borderlands, settler colonialism, and the spatial dimensions of power in early North America.