John P. Bowes - Böcker

Exiles and Pioneers analyzes the removal and post-removal histories of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Indians. The book argues that the experience of these eastern Indians from the late 1700s to the 1860s was at its core a struggle over geographic and political place within the expanding United States. Even as American expansion limited the geographic scope of Indian lands, the extension of American territories and authority raised important questions about the political status of these Indians as individuals as well as nations within the growing republic. More specifically, the national narrative and even the prominent images of Indian removal cast the eastern Indians as exiles who were constantly pushed beyond the edges of American settlement. This study proposes that ineffective federal policies and ongoing debates within Indian communities also cast some of these eastern Indians as pioneers, unwilling trailblazers in the development of the United States.

Exiles and Pioneers analyzes the removal and post-removal histories of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Indians. The book argues that the experience of these eastern Indians from the late 1700s to the 1860s was at its core a struggle over geographic and political place within the expanding United States. Even as American expansion limited the geographic scope of Indian lands, the extension of American territories and authority raised important questions about the political status of these Indians as individuals as well as nations within the growing republic. More specifically, the national narrative and even the prominent images of Indian removal cast the eastern Indians as exiles who were constantly pushed beyond the edges of American settlement. This study proposes that ineffective federal policies and ongoing debates within Indian communities also cast some of these eastern Indians as pioneers, unwilling trailblazers in the development of the United States.

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized President Andrew Jackson to move eastern Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory. Often solely associated with the Cherokee, the ""Trail of Tears"" more accurately describes the forced removal of the Five Civilized Tribes, which in addition to the Cherokee includes the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. This book is an insightful and honest exploration of this dark chapter in Native American history.

The history of Indian removal has often followed a single narrative arc, one that begins with President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 and follows the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In that conventional account, the Black Hawk War of 1832 encapsulates the experience of tribes in the territories north of the Ohio River. But Indian removal in the Old Northwest was much more complicated - involving many Indian peoples and more than just one policy, event, or politician. In Land Too Good for Indians, historian John P. Bowes takes a long-needed closer, more expansive look at northern Indian removal - and in so doing amplifies the history of Indian removal and of the United States.Bowes focuses on four case studies that exemplify particular elements of removal in the Old Northwest. He traces the paths taken by Delaware Indians in response to Euro-American expansion and U.S. policies in the decades prior to the Indian Removal Act. He also considers the removal experience among the Seneca-Cayugas, Wyandots, and other Indian communities in the Sandusky River region of northwestern Ohio. Bowes uses the 1833 Treaty of Chicago as a lens through which to examine the forces that drove the divergent removals of various Potawatomi communities from northern Illinois and Indiana. And in exploring the experiences of the Odawas and Ojibwes in Michigan Territory, he analyzes the historical context and choices that enabled some Indian communities to avoid relocation west of the Mississippi River.In expanding the context of removal to include the Old Northwest, and adding a portrait of Native communities there before, during, and after removal, Bowes paints a more accurate - and complicated - picture of American Indian history in the nineteenth century. Land Too Good for Indians reveals the deeper complexities of this crucial time in American history.