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ix Acknowledgments Books, like people, have histories. And this book, in particular, is inextricably tied to T. Randolph Noe. A probate lawyer living in Louisville, Kentucky , Randy collected documents related to Shawnee history for more than a decade. His love of Shawnee history compelled him to travel vast distances, at his own expense, in search of everything that had ever been published about the Shawnee people. When Randy passed away in 2003, he left behind a published bibliography and a vast archive that continues to live among Shawnee people, who have used the knowledge contained within it to create maps, grant projects, and many other efforts related to the preservation of their remarkable history. Randy and I got to know each other in 2000, when my partner, Kristy, and I were living in Berea, Kentucky. We met several times to discuss our shared love of Shawnee history. We even managed to travel to the War Dance at the North Ceremonial Ground, in Little Axe, Oklahoma. Most historians work in private, mulling over the small details of big projects for years on end. Randy helped me to realize that the closed loop that I maintained in my mind could, in fact, be shared. We talked for hours on end about Shawnee history and began to share our documents and our knowledge with members of the federally recognized Shawnee tribes. Randy became that rare person who could and would discuss the particulars of troubling documents, the hard-to-discover villages, and the seeming non sequiturs that represent the printed knowledge of Shawnee history. When cancer claimed him, we all lost a raconteur whose generosity is rare indeed. Kristy and I then moved to Rock Island, Illinois, to teach at Augustana College. Randy’s kids thus had to drive his archive from Kentucky to Illinois , and I am grateful for the trouble they went through. With twentyfour banker-boxes of material, I struggled to find room to house it all. But the real challenge lay in the fact that this treasure trove of material arrived the night before our first child, Cormac, arrived in this world. Kristy remained, as always, more composed than I was amid the shuffling of boxes and the final adjustments to our foolproof birth plan. Miraculously, we all survived the ordeal, as the singer John Prine has sung, “in spite x / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of ourselves.” By 2005, Kristy and I had published our first books. The richness of our shared life together has only been increased by the arrival of Declan in 2006 and Josie in 2009. Our children have had to share in our professional journey, quite literally, from the beginning. But they have grown to appreciate the opportunities research presents. Cormac even had the audacity to break from vegetarianism and eat his first cheeseburger in Norman, Oklahoma, while I was on a research trip. Since that fall night a decade ago, I have shared Randy’s collection with members of the three federally recognized Shawnee tribes. Working with cultural preservation officers and Augustana students, we created a national map of Shawnee locations. We unveiled the map in 2005, and Shawnee people marveled in amazement at the depth and breadth of their travels across North America. For tribes such as the Shawnees—forced from their Ohio homeland into Indian Territory, what is now Oklahoma— the map and the documents have become a kind of repatriation of cultural and historical knowledge. Contemporary Shawnees know a thing or two about resilience, and the map seemed to confirm that this trait has stayed with the Shawnee people since colonizers arrived and reordered the natural and cultural worlds to which they were accustomed. At least initially, archival research became the means by which I have been able to participate in an extended conversation with many Shawnee people, who have worked tirelessly to maintain their culture and to recover what has been lost. Randy’s archive has become a never-ending gift, as more and more Shawnee people have shared in the knowledge it contains. Books derive as much from the authors who write them as from the editors who acquire and improve them. I did not begin researching this project in earnest until 2008, when Robbie Ethridge asked me to contribute a chapter to her book, co-edited with Sheri Shuck-Hall, Mapping the Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South. Robbie saw the potential in this project well before I did, and I am very...

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