The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America by Stephen Warren (review)

On the eve of the Seven Years’ War, a Cherokee named Tasattee noted that the Shawnees were “a People of no Settlement but rambling from Place to Place” (77). In his recent work, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America, Stephen Warren traces the paths the Shawnees forged across various early American worlds between 1400 and 1754. Confronted with Native slavers, Iroquois warriors, and Old World diseases, the Shawnee people abandoned their homeland in the Middle Ohio River Valley and embarked on a journey that carried them far from their traditional lands. Rather than undermining Shawnee identity and culture, however, migration allowed the Shawnee people to reimagine themselves as they interacted with colonizers, formed new alliances, and secured a foothold in the often violent borderlands between peoples. Indeed, Warren argues, “migration, warfare, and alliance—hallmarks of colonial America—became sacred elements of Shawnee identity” (22). Drawing on a broad array of archival materials as well as oral histories, archeological evidence, and ethnographic research, Warren offers a compelling narrative of the Shawnees’ adaptation and survival in the colonial world.

European colonists knew the Shawnee as “the Greatest Travellers in America,” renowned for their “linguistic range, diplomatic acumen, and military prowess” (25). English and French colonial leaders competed to gain their favor, recognizing the Shawnee as valuable guides, slave hunters, traders, and allies. According to Warren, the Shawnee understood the contested borderlands as strategic centers and intentionally positioned themselves at these violent intersections between peoples. Poised between burgeoning colonial towns and powerful Native confederacies, the Shawnee “helped to integrate diverse regions and peoples into a shared Atlantic World” (81). But even as the Shawnee embraced the cosmopolitan nature of the eastern seaboard, they remained committed to their village-based way of life. Individual villages remained fiercely independent, functioning as autonomous political units and baffling colonial officials who struggled to define the Shawnee as either friend or foe.

By the eighteenth century, the decline of the Indian slave trade combined with colonists’ voracious land hunger, splintered relations between the Shawnee and their European allies. Seeking to protect their economic and cultural sovereignty, the Shawnees abandoned their villages in the borderlands and returned to the Ohio Valley. Warren argues that the Shawnee, with their histories of migration and reinvention, were at the forefront of the new racial consciousness and pan-Indian revitalization movements that gained momentum in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Shawnees’ vast knowledge of the Eastern Woodlands, ability to comprehend and adapt to new political realities, and experience building alliances proved foundational for the pan-Indian resistance movements that swept the Eastern Woodlands between the Seven Years’ War and the War of 1812.

The Worlds the Shawnees Made contributes to the ongoing debates over the nature of American Indian identity and the impact of European colonization. Warren challenges the belief that all Native peoples derived their identities from the land they inhabited, arguing that historians and anthropologists have failed to appreciate the “profoundly different notions of place and identity” for Native peoples east and west of the Mississippi (238). As a result, many American Indian histories have equated migration necessarily with loss, ignoring the fact that Native peoples practiced migration as a survival strategy well before the US government engaged in a formal policy of forced relocation. The implications of Warren’s work extend beyond the boundaries of the Shawnee community. Warren suggests that the Shawnee are emblematic of Native peoples in the Eastern Woodlands, pointing to widespread migrations and increasingly multiethnic Native communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. People throughout the colonial world—both Natives and Europeans—inhabited pluralistic worlds, characterized by movement and cultural exchange. Throughout the colonial period and well into the revolutionary era, the Shawnee and their neighbors ensured their survival and preserved their cultural identity by embracing mobility and taking advantage of new opportunities in a rapidly changing world.