Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region by David Andrew Nichols (review)

The history of Indian–white relations in the Old Northwest and the eventual more expansive Midwest is well known by historians of the region. David Nichols, professor of history at Indiana State University and a specialist in Native American history, recounts that story with a gracefully written, cogent, and solidly researched narrative about Indian and white contacts from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. He analyzes the desire of the Native Americans for trade goods and European alliances and the want of European and American Empires for resources, ultimately land, and loyalty. Nichols emphasizes the Native American struggle to retain cultural identity and agency. His primary goal is "to explore these two struggles: one for political independence within a world of foreign empires, and one for cultural survival in an environment vastly altered by Empire goods, disease, animals, and people" (3). His survey of Native American relations with the French and British empires, the re-structuring of relationships with the British colonial Americans, and the emergence of confederacies as well as Indian–white relations after the American Revolution will be familiar to many readers. Nichols's narrative, however, provides an excellent survey for students and scholars coming to the subject for the first time. He makes, however, a more important contribution to this history of Indian–white relations in the Great Lakes region, because he provides a revisionist history as a counterpoint to Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 1991). Nichols makes the critical point, based on considerable evidence, that the region was not a middle ground. It was Indian ground. Moreover, the Great Lakes country remained Indian domain until political and military events changed for the region after Lord Dunmore's War in 1774, although some might argue after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

Nichols argues that despite French, British, and American designs for the region based on their own political, economic, and military needs, all of the representative governments dealt with the Great Lakes nations from a position of weakness. The Americans only used military force successfully twice to achieve their aims, once during the 1790s and again during the War of 1812. By the later period demographics, that is, population, and technology, primarily in the form of military weaponry, prevailed against the Native nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, most Native American groups had suffered loss of their land, removal from the region, and despair as well as racism and fear. Not all tribal groups, however, left the region under governmental and military dictate. The Ojibwas, most Ottawas (Odawas), and Menominees in the northern region remained because whites did not value their lands and wanted their labor and tax money. The Ho-Chunk (Winnebagos), Miamis, and Potawatomies surreptitiously remained or fled to Canada.

In this context, Nichols traces white, both government and individual, relationships with the Native American people in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin in the southern Great Lakes region as well as those in parts of Ontario located north and east of Lakes Huron, Ontario, and Superior. These Indian groups, Nichols contends, had long-established trade relationships and military alliances. They held the balance of power in the Great Lakes region or Upper Country. They could be allies or enemies as their situation warranted and always for their own purposes. Nichols argues that the Great Lakes Indians organized, negotiated, and fought on their own terms. The region was not a middle ground; at least not until the federal Constitution of 1787 created a powerful federation that soon superseded Native American confederacies in people and power. The new American nation could replace the loss of settlers and soldiers relatively easily for westward expansion, but the Native American groups did not have the ability...