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  • Let’s Hear It For the Losers
  • Mary Young (bio)
Colin G. Calloway. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxiii + 327 pp. Maps, notes, illustrations, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

In 1775, eastern North America abounded in multiethnic communities, both outside and within the “Indian frontier.” In his introductory chapters, Colin Calloway emphasizes the similarities between the experiences of these communities on both sides of the porous “line” that separated them. In both, young men were questioning traditional authority, seeking autonomy, and withholding deference. One result of the weakening of deference to authority was that young men on both sides sometimes killed one another in defiance of their elders. With the help of hard-working revivalists and missionaries, both Indian and Anglo-European communities were undergoing considerable religious ferment. Varieties of demographic change challenged them. Men on both sides resented threats to their liberty, and wondered how their children would find living in the next new world. When the American Revolution came along, both Indian and Anglo-European communities divided over whether or not it deserved their support.

Not only similarities, but certain kinds of social intimacy linked Indian communities and white. Captives and traders lived in tribal towns, were adopted into clans, exercised political leadership, and fathered children of mixed ethnicity. Indian people entered colonial towns as visitors, traders, and ambassadors, and lived in them as servants, slaves, soldiers, students, bricklayers, blacksmiths, interpreters, guides, sailors and whalers. While most Indian people still lived in communities under their own control, resorted to dreams for guidance, tattooed their bodies, wore their hair in distinctive styles, and, if male, eschewed trousers in favor of breechcloths, English-style shirts, skirts, jackets, and waistcoats were as popular as the needles required to repair them and the mirrors that permitted the narcissistic to admire themselves. Hewed-log houses, the occasional church, pigs, cows, horses, chickens, and the occasional plow or fence bespoke both cultural and agricultural transition in many eastern woodlands communities. French [End Page 579] traders took up tattooing, canoes, and moccasins, while some Indian villages hosted colonists who sought not merely their herbal remedies, but their healers. Governor Patrick Tonyn of East Florida, speaking of the “wild” people called Seminoles, described them as settled among the Florida plantations and “‘interwoven with us’” (p. 255). That many of these Seminoles traded with Cuba, spoke Spanish, and wore silver crosses apparently did not diminish their loyalty to the trade goods and employment opportunities their British neighbors provided.

Native American participation on both sides of the American War for Independence initially resulted in greater distancing and often greater hostility between Indian and Anglo-European communities. Although native people both as individuals and as tribal fragments served the patriot cause, the legend grew that not just most but all Indians had been ferocious allies of a brutal tyrant. Sharing the fundamental perspectives of Richard White and Gregory Evans Dowd on the disintegration of the “middle ground” between Anglo-European and Indian communities, Calloway emphasizes more than they the efforts of patriot partisans and peace advocates among the tribes. He stresses the physical and cultural destruction the Indian communities suffered in the course of the conflict. In pursuit of these emphases, he focuses his attention on the revolutionary experiences of a variety of local communities: Odanak, on the St. Francis river in French Canada, a mission peopled by refugees and captives, whose largest fragment consisted of Abenaki from northern New England; Stockbridge, a western Massachusetts mission and refugee haven for displaced tribesmen from eastern New England and the Hudson valley; Oquaga, a multiethnic but predominantly Oneida community on the Susquehanna; Fort Niagara, a wartime refugee community for Iroquois allies of the British; Maquachake, a division of the Shawnee tribe mainly Ohioan at the outbreak of conflict; Chota, a Cherokee “beloved town” in present-day East Tennessee; Tchoukafala, a Chickasaw town in present-day Mississippi; and Cuscowilla, a Seminole town on the Alachua prairie of East Florida.

The local perspective serves well to illustrate the variety of tribal responses to revolution, their internal conflicts over the alternatives of neutrality, British alliance, and adherence...

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