Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870 by Sami Lakomäki (review)

IN GATHERING TOGETHER, Sami Lakomäki has written an impressive historical analysis of Shawnee histories over the course of nearly three centuries. From the opening pages he is clear about his intentions to demonstrate the manner in which an examination of Shawnee actions during this extensive chronology have the ability to reveal “how indigenous peoples drew from their culture, creativity, and power to shape the new geopolitical order” (2). More important, Lakomäki argues that the efforts of Shawnees to gather their scattered communities together from the colonial through the American era reveal a drive for nationhood that was based on “indigenous agendas and ideas” as much as they were “powerfully shaped by colonialism” (10). In many ways he wants to develop a more sophisticated analysis of the transition from the colonial period to Indigenous peoples’ engagement with the early American republic and its policies. The scope of the effort is ambitious, and at the very least this book provides an argument that deserves and no doubt will provoke a serious conversation about Indigenous formations of nationhood.

Over the course of seven chapters Lakomäki traces the movements and actions of diasporic Shawnee communities and weaves a narrative primarily focused on two divergent actions. The first is that of the Shawnees who chose migration and dispersal as their response to colonial pressures and violence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second is that of the Shawnees who by the early nineteenth century began to view and lay claim to the lower Ohio country as a homeland. It is in the actions and recorded statements of the latter that Lakomäki finds the determination of Shawnee leaders like Catahecassa to define “the Shawnee nation in increasingly narrow terms” (143). And it is in the westward migrations of the late 1700s and those relocations led by Quitewepea and Tenskwatawa in the 1820s that Lakomäki identifies “a strategy to assert autonomy from the centralized Shawnee national leadership” (162). Of course nothing is quite so easily defined, and although Lakomäki understands and refers to the complex reality that underlies simplistic categories, he generally assesses the situation as one in which the Shawnees in Ohio were developing an idea of Shawnee nationality and the Shawnees in other areas were outliers in that process.

Lakomäki has an adept handle on the scholarship and the written source materials necessary to write on this particular topic. He often makes use of the linguistic and cultural material produced by well-respected scholars like Carl Voegelin and Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin to develop his points. Yet it is difficult to assess Gathering Together without comparing it to another book on the Shawnees published in 2014, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America by Stephen Warren. Although the latter book covers a shorter time span than Lakomäki’s work, the thematic and topical overlap is significant. And despite the cultural analysis that Lakomäki frequently provides, the inner world of the Shawnees is not as developed or apparent as it is in Warren’s book. For example, Lakomäki emphasizes vibrant kinship networks and collective decision-making institutions as elements that kept the Shawnees connected despite numerous geographic dispersals from the seventeenth century forward. Yet even that explanation fails to identify what each Shawnee believed it meant to be Shawnee, and therefore does not establish in an effective manner the cultural elements that grounded attitudes toward centralization. And centralization is a key piece to the overall arc of his narrative. His assertion in the concluding chapter that the Ohio Shawnees viewed themselves as a “landed nation” is both critical to Lakomäki’s overall analysis and also a catalyst for debate. It raises questions about the extent to which those Shawnees held those beliefs and, more important, to what extent the Shawnees at Wapakoneta and other Ohio villages in the late 1820s might be viewed as representative of the larger...