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  • Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 by Susan Sleeper-Smith
  • Alexis Guilbault (bio)
Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792. By Susan Sleeper-Smith. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 348. $45.00 cloth; $27.95 paper; $19.99 ebook)

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest is a riveting social and environmental history that describes the interconnected Native village world of the Ohio Valley from the late-seventeenth century through the early-nineteenth century. Susan Sleeper-Smith demonstrates that Indian women's work in agriculture and the fur trade provided Native nations with the strength and stability to determine terms of interaction with British and French officials and settlers and to win key victories over the U.S. military. Once American military leaders realized that Indian women provided the food and trade goods essential to support Indian war efforts, they altered their tactics, turning to environmental destruction and kidnapping Indian women and children to advance American colonization of the midcontinent.

Sleeper-Smith critiques and enhances Richard White's conception of the Ohio Valley in The Middle Ground (1991), disagreeing with his characterization of the region as a "shattered world of refugees," while supporting his argument that compromise defined daily interaction. Her discussion of this well-developed agrarian landscape and fur trade world defies popularized notions of Indians as nomadic hunter-gatherers [End Page 325] and recognizes Indian women's agrarian work as central to the economic and social organization of Ohio River Valley life.

The book is divided into two sections, one that "explores the rise of an Indian agricultural world" and another that "explores the disruption of that prosperous Indian world" (p. 8). Chapter one relies on early environmental histories and travelers' accounts to highlight Native women's agricultural pursuits including an Indigenous seed trade network, the implementation of advanced sustainability practices, and the cultivation of corn. Chapters two through five contain an impressive display of fur trade material culture and "reestablish the positive role of the fur trade in Indian life" (p. 162). Chapter two describes connections between the thriving village world of Ohio Indians and the French fur trading post at Green Bay (also the site of a Native hunting and trading village) and emphasizes Indian women's increased involvement in the processing and trading of furs as the eighteenth century progressed.

Chapters three and four examine British involvement in the fur trade, beginning with the rise of Detroit in the early-eighteenth century. Here, Odawa, Miami, and Illinois men "emerged as independent traders engineering a vast exchange of furs for cloth" across eastern North America (p. 104). Chapter four discusses Pontiac's Rebellion and the enduring strength and support of Indigenous "Webs of Community," which proved "a vivid reminder that . . . European empires existed with the consent of Indians who manipulated imperial rivalries to meet their own goals" (p. 130). In chapter five, a real treat titled "Picturing Prosperity," Sleeper-Smith provides a rich visual analysis of the most desirable fur trade goods, metal and cloth. She explains how the turn to vibrantly colored and ornately crafted brooches, beads, coats, and blouses, "reflected [a] change in Indian demand," rather than a loss of Indianness, by the mid-eighteenth century (p. 160).

Chapters six and seven focus on violence employed by the U.S. government to force the Shawnee, Miami, and others from their homelands north of the Ohio River. The entire book builds to key [End Page 326] Indian victories against Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair in 1790 and 1791 made possible by Indian women's long agrarian tradition and fur trade prosperity. Chapter eight, "Aftermath," balances Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa's pan-Indian resistance movement, the standard narrative of early-nineteenth-century Native Americans in history classes, by describing widespread efforts for pan-Indian accommodation to mitigate the effects of and/or resist American colonialism.

Sleeper-Smith's insistence on "placing gender at the heart of this narrative" enlivens an Indigenous village world worthy of further study (p. 283). Her focus on Native persistence is essential for the necessary reconceptualization of the Ohio Valley as...

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