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

During the past three decades, scholars like Colin Calloway, Jerry Clark, and David Edmunds have greatly enriched our understanding of the history of the Shawnees, a famous but (to outsiders) often enigmatic Indian nation. Nearly all of their scholarship focuses on the period between the Revolution and Removal. Historians have found it difficult to write a coherent account of the colonial-era Shawnees because of that nation’s geographical dispersal and multiplicity of experiences. To scholars’ rescue comes Stephen Warren, already an accomplished historian of the Shawnee nation and an interviewee in the PBS series We Shall Remain. In his new book, Warren supplies a descriptive term that unites the disparate histories of early Shawnee communities: “parochial cosmopolitanism” (18). The Shawnees, he argues, became a well-traveled people with extensive cultural connections, but they also retained a coherent identity as a separate people. What allowed them to do so was their adoption of “symbolic and portable . . . markers of identity” (78), such as allegiance to particular towns (which could move over time) and rituals of national renewal. The Shawnees thus did not need a specific geographical homeland to sustain their nationhood.

Following archeologists’ lead, Warren identifies the Shawnees as descendants of the Fort Ancient culture (1000–1500 c.e.), an Ohio Valley people who lived in self-sufficient settlements while trading with and adopting cultural institutions from their neighbors. In the seventeenth century the proto-Shawnees began to buy European goods, and Warren argues (persuasively) that they dispersed later in that century to maintain access to European trade, not because the Iroquois conquered them. The Shawnees’ subsequent diaspora becomes the main focus of Warren’s book. Many moved to the Carolina–Georgia piedmont, where they became allies of the Creeks and slavers for the English. Several hundred moved west and joined the Grand Village of the Kaskaskias, actually a small multinational city with access to rich hunting and French trade. Still others resettled with the Susquehannocks and became members of the Iroquois Covenant Chain. As the Shawnees felt secure in their own corporate identity, they had no misgivings about living in multiethnic communities or confederating with other Native American groups.

The Shawnees wanted to help create “middle grounds,” zones where different Indian nations and European traders could live together peacefully. They soon learned that at least one group of colonists, the English, had no interest in this project. Carolinians and Virginians sold Shawnee captives into slavery, and Pennsylvanians used debt to strip Shawnees of their land. In the 1720s the Shawnees began to re-coalesce in the Ohio Valley, establishing new communities like Lower Shawnee Town, or joining their relatives in Upper Creek country. This new generation of migrants felt growing hostility toward the British, which would erupt into warfare during the 1750s.

This is a hard story to tell well, given the huge geographical range of colonial-era Shawnees, but Warren does so in clear and elegant prose. He leaves unanswered, however, one question with great relevance to the Shawnees’ future: did they confederate with other Native Americans out of pragmatism, or did they also develop a sense of pan-Indian identity? Actually, Warren provides an ambivalent answer to this question: Shawnees and other Ohio Valley Indians saw themselves as “inheritors of a common history” (196), but also “resisted national and interregional unity” (221). This ambivalence supports Warren’s thesis about Shawnee “parochial cosmopolitanism,” itself an ambivalent term, but one would like to know why so many Shawnees resolved this tension by supporting pan-Indian confederation in the Revolutionary era. Arguably, Warren deserves credit for raising this particular question, or rather for providing a useful new way to frame it.