Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal by John P. Bowes (review)

In American history, the term "Indian Removal" has often been used to describe the process of robbing indigenous people of their land—and consequently their lives, livelihood, and culture—by others seeking their homelands. This term, created by historians in their studies and by Congress for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, is an antiseptic one that offers neither value judgment nor consideration of causal action. Its neutrality really is not neutral, and it allows for the covering up of a significant bloody movement that has not yet been rectified. John P. Bowes's Land Too Good for Indians, although published in 2016, falls into the traditional approach of using the term "Indian Removal" in its title and elsewhere.

Today, most modern excursions into "Indian Removal" history describe this extended event as a type of genocide. There are now comparative historical treatments of the vicious acts perpetrated against various groups by a majority society. These acts, then and now, violate human rights. Would we call the Holocaust attack on Jews preceding and during World War II in Europe a "Jewish Removal"? No, that is just as inappropriate as is "Indian Removal."

Driving midwestern Indian nations off their lands caused great suffering. Many of them lost the majority of their people as well as their homes. This ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, as well as the establishment of reservations often on non-productive lands, forced Indian nations into great poverty and food deprivation. The other states of the Midwest tried to force all their Indian inhabitants to leave but never completed the action; indeed, reservations continue to exist on the peripheries of the Midwest. Every tribal nation has its own story about its forced exit from homelands, and these stories are often unique. Each Native group responded in a variety of ways in order to save its culture and its members' homes. Some reacted with warfare and violence; some tried negotiations that often proved fruitless. Unique were the Mesquaki of Iowa who negotiated not a reservation but a "settlement in common" near the Iowa River in central Iowa's Tama County. They are the only Indian nation still residing in the state. Most historians and map makers do not understand this historic exception and its legal meaning.

Above all, it should be stated that so-called "Indian removals" occurred in every state in the lands that became the United States. It all started with the colonials from Europe, and the federal government and state governments continued the process. It is not peculiar to the Midwest, and it is not done. Indian lands are still confiscated through various legal means. There seems to be no time limit to these actions.

Let us be clear. Indigenous Americans today are descendants of those who survived war, massacres, dislocations, germ warfare, forced famines, hangings, long walks, various trails of tears, arsons, double-crossed treaties and negotiations, organized murders, and stolen lands. These are the actions of genocide, and not the historic traits of a neutral journey.

A number of books have been written about "Indian Removal," especially about the treatment of Indians in the American South. The recounting of removal history north of the Ohio River in the Midwest has been done in a piecemeal essay fashion and in far fewer books. One of the first scholars to do so, in articles written in the 1950s, was the historian Carl Klopfenstein of Ohio. He devoted his writing career to this history topic. The most recent book publication is Bowes'. In some ways, its subtitle's reference to "Northern Indian Removal" is geographically challenged, given that the book is about the Midwest and not about Native Americans in Alaska, Washington, Montana, the Dakotas, Maine, Vermont, or New Hampshire. The subtitle is a reaction to the historiographical emphasis on "southern removals."

This book, like Klopfenstein's, is the product of Bowes' lifetime of interest and research. It is meticulously...