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

In 2013, on the first day of an upper-level seminar, “Early North American Diasporas,” students gathered to discuss the course outline and topics to be covered. During this overview it became clear they had many questions concerning the course content, but in particular they honestly asked, “What is diaspora?” As a historian of the Wendat diaspora, I couldn’t help but be a little disheartened, while at the same time I took it as a sign that more needed to be done in this field.

Since that time, the shift in publications and research into diasporic communities and specifically indigenous diasporas has grown considerably. Notable publications along these lines include Kathryn Magee Labelle’s Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Wendat People (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), Stephen Warren’s Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman’s edited volume Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and Gregory D. Smithers’s The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). This corpus of scholarship has enriched and reformed not only our perspectives on diaspora studies but also ethno-historical research on First Nation experiences that have often confounded scholars trying to fit the mobile and nonstate characteristics of these societies into European sedentary and state-centered interpretations. Among these important contributions is Sami Lakomäki’s Gathering Together.

Lakomäki effectively maps out the somewhat ambiguous trail (both physical and metaphorical) the Shawnee left between 1600 to 1870 as they dispersed from the Ohio Valley to Indian Country (Oklahoma). It explores notions of homelands and migration, community and state formation, arguing that the Shawnee had two distinct strategies during this period: “a collective, bounded Shawnee country” and “shared land with various Native allies” (6). By historicizing these strategies within the context of an Early American history framework, he highlights the tensions and connections between Shawnee communities as their identities transformed in the wake of colonial European regimes. The work includes Shawnee experiences throughout well-known events such as the seventeenth-century Iroquois Wars, Seven Years’ War / French and Indian War (1756–63), The American Revolution (1773–83), War of 1812, and the American Civil War (1861–65). Overall, Gathering Together exposes the connectivity maintained within different Shawnee groups throughout multiple relocations, colonial wars, and nation-state formation. It persuades us to see diaspora as a source of power, not one of weakness, with a desire to describe how the Shawnee shaped the post-contact world and imagined themselves.

This is ethnohistorical research at its best. Using a culturally sensitive and interdisciplinary methodology, Lakomäki approaches the documents (mostly written texts by non-Shawnee actors) with a critical eye, refusing to take them at face value. An example of the success of this approach is shown in his description of Shawnee leadership. Lakomäki is not persuaded by the colonial records that depict an “egalitarian cooperation among the various communities” and looks at Shawnee “family backgrounds and kinship of Shawnee leaders” to defend his conclusion that “hierarchical relations evolved among the Shawnee divisions during the 1760s, with the Mekoches assuming the leadership of the consolidating nation” (84, 85). Still, this is not enough. Lakomäki goes further and sees Native oral history as the ultimate source for solving such contradictions. In this case, he uses Thomas Wildcat Alford’s 1920 transcriptions of Pekowi-Kishpoko-Thawikila elder oral histories, then compares these histories with Shawnee origin legends, centering his analysis in Shawnee cosmologies rather than European ones (85).

Shawnee perspectives are also explored through an examination of wampum belts. These material records of a belt or string of beads were “integral element of Indian diplomacy across...