Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler (review)

sweeping in scope yet surprisingly detailed in focus, this well-written survey of the interaction of tribal people with American Indian policy in the region east of the Great Plains concentrates on the period from the American Revolution through the beginning of the Civil War. Ostler combines a continuing analysis of the development of American Indian policy with descriptions and discussions of how that policy was applied to different tribal groups or nations. Some of these discussions are more lengthy (the Creek Red Sticks War, Cherokee resistance to removal, the Black Hawk War), while others are more brief (Ho-Chunks in Wisconsin and Nebraska, Potawatomi and Kickapoo removals, Houmas in Louisiana, Mashpees in Massachusetts), but the book's coverage, while necessarily uneven, is refreshingly comprehensive. Moreover, the volume is well documented, and the extensive endnotes provide readers with additional sources (both primary and secondary) to pursue supplemental investigation or research into tribes, individuals, incidents, or federal policies mentioned or discussed briefly in the text.

Ostler's analysis of American Indian policy is hardly flattering. He persuasively argues that although policy decisions often were couched in altruistic language, they were primarily motivated by Anglo-American desire to obtain Native American land. Although Thomas Jefferson and some of his cohorts may have talked of a trans-Mississippi zone where eastern tribes-people would be provided with a permanent home, they grossly underestimated the avarice of white frontiersmen and the speed of their westward movement. Moreover, the "Founding Fathers'" successors formulated policies to obtain remaining Indian lands east of the Mississippi or failed to protect remaining land bases previously guaranteed to tribal people by earlier treaties. As Ostler illustrates, once the eastern tribes were pushed into the trans-Mississippi West, their new homes in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska also were gobbled up by white settlement, and these tribes, along with people indigenous to the region (Osages, Kanzas, Otoe-Missourias, etc.) were forced to relocate into Oklahoma. This is hardly a new story to anyone familiar with Native American history, but Ostler's "blow-by-blow" discussion of these events is particularly effective as he delineates and describes the multifaceted duplicity of American Indian policy. Even hardened, jaded apologists for American imperialism should be moved by Ostler's well-documented account of these policies and their subsequent impact on tribal people.

Ostler is well aware of the ongoing debate over terms such as "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" that have arisen during the past two decades among ethnohistorians and other academics. Admittedly, academics seem to revel in arguments over defining these terms, and although Ostler initially seems reluctant to embrace the concept that colonial officials and later federal, state, and local governments wholeheartedly pursued such policies, his discussion of federal Indian policy and his detailed accounts of the interaction of tribal people and non-Indians during these years bear ample testimony that such circumstances occurred. As Shakespeare pointed out, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," and Ostler's discussion of British officers at Fort Pitt sending smallpox-laden blankets down the Ohio River to the Delawares in 1763, the Gnadenhutten massacre in 1782, and the suffering and loss of life during the removals of the 1830s and 1840s, among many other instances, speak for themselves. Indeed, in his conclusion Ostler admits that after compiling, chronicling, and analyzing these events he "could not escape the conviction that what I was witnessing was genocide" (387).

This is an important book. It is buttressed by excellent endnotes and supported by an appendix containing chronological population estimates for many of the tribes or nations. The volume is blessed with excellent maps and features selected portraits and contemporary illustrations of people or events mentioned in the text. Its length and detail might limit its use as a text for some undergraduates, but it could readily serve as a text for upper-classmen or in graduate courses focused...