History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992

Changing Patterns of Ethnicity in the Northeastern Plains, 1780–1870

Patricia C. Albers Changing Patterns of Ethnicity in the Northeastern Plains, 1780-1870 Over twenty years ago, William Sturtevant introduced the idea of ethnogenesis to American anthropology in a pioneering study of the sociopolitical processes by which the Seminole became differentiated historically from the Creek (1971: 92). Although he defined ethnogenesis in this work simply as "the establishment of group distinctiveness," his study actually touched upon broad transformational processes in ethnic group identification. These involve the long-term movements by which the ethnic identities of human communities get changed, and as such they are historical and evolutionary in scope (Moore 1987). But no matter how it is specified, ethnogenesis is an important idea that needs to be recovered and included in any conceptual discourse on ethnic phenomena. It is also a concept whose myriad dimensions require further exploration and explication. Although ethnic phenomena have drawn a great deal of scholarly interest over the past few decades, the concept of ethnogenesis has gotten buried and lost under the more inclusive rubric "ethnicity." In the literature on historic North American Indian populations, for example, considerable attention has been paid to the scope and variety of ethnic identities and interethnic relations (Elmendorf 1971; Anastasio 1972; Albers 1974; Davis 1974; Trigger 1976; Sharrock 1977; Ewers 1975; Weist 1977; Blu 1980; Wood 1980; Fromhold 1981; Ford 1983; Muga 1984, 1988; Albers and James 1986; Bishop 1987; Hanson 1986, 1987; Albers and Kay 1987; Tanner 1987; Miller 1989; Milloy 1988; White 1991; Quinn 1993; Miller and Boxberger 1994). However, only a few studies (Sturtevant 1971, 1983; Sharrock 1974; Wood and Downer 1977; Ethnicity in the Northeastern Plains 91 Greenberg and Morrison 1981; Moore 1987; Albers 1993) actually address how local groups changed their ethnic identities as a result of their relationships with others or reveal how ethnogenesis involved a variety of different transformative processes. Many of the better-known examples of ethnogenesis result from conflict and fission, but there are a number ofinteresting cases where transformations in ethnic identities were based on cooperation and fusion. As a form of ethnogenesis , neither interethnic fusion, hybridizaton, or merger has been as well described as other historical processes of ethnic change (Albers 1993: 112122 ). The situation of the Plains Assiniboin, Cree, and Ojibwa, as originally reported in the pioneering study of Susan Sharrock (1974), is one notable exception. Throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these populations jointly occupied a large area of territory in the northeastern Plains, and in varying ways and degrees they intermarried and collaborated in a range ofactivities from combat and trade to subsistence and ceremony. Segments of these populations also lived together, eventually forming composite residence groups in which new ethnic identifications developed over time. The historic situation of the Plains Assiniboin, Cree, and Ojibwa did not conform to typical tribal models where territories were divided, claimed, and defended by discrete ethnic groups, nor did it fit descriptions in which political allegiances were defined primarily in exclusive ethnic terms. Ethnicity in the generic and highly abstract sense of a "tribal" name did not always function as marker of geopolitical boundaries. Given a pluralistic pattern of land use and alliance making, most of their ethnic categories did not have a high level ofsalience or any a priori power to organize and distribute people across geographic space. What appears to have been more important in defining the geopolitics ofaccess to land, labor, and resources were social ties based on ties ofkinship and sodality in their varied metaphoric extensions and expressions. Indeed, it was only after the imposition ofU. S. and Canadian sovereignty that their ethnic names took on any real importance, and then it was only because these were invested with the legal power of treaties written by nation-states (Sharrock 1974; Albers and Kay 1987). In addition to serving as an important challenge to conventional representations of American Indian ethnicity and geopolitics, their case also provides an apt illustration of the variable paths ethnogenesis takes. In particular, it highlights instances of ethnogenesis where processes of merger rather than separation dominate ethnic change. Merger is one of a continuum of accommodations that groups of different ethnic origins make to each other's presence , and, as described at length elsewhere (Albers 1993: 112-122), it is a type of interdependence involving the mutual use and protection of a shared land base. As an accommodation that ethnic groups make to each other's presence, 92...