In addition to reprinting the full text of Clifton's extraordinary ethnohistory, this expanded edition features a new essay offering a narrative of his continuing professional and personal encounters, since 1962, with this enduring native community. -- ‡c From back cover.

Following the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, the Potawatomis, once concentrated around southern Lake Michigan, increasingly dispersed into nine bands across four states, two countries, and a thousand miles. How is it, author Christopher Wetzel asks, that these scattered people, with different characteristics and traditions cultivated over two centuries, have reclaimed their common cultural heritage in recent years as the Potawatomi Nation? And why a “nation”—not a band or a tribe—in an age when nations seem increasingly impermanent? Gathering the Potawatomi Nation explores the recent invigoration of Potawatomi nationhood, looks at how marginalized communities adapt to social change, and reveals the critical role that culture plays in connecting the two. Wetzel’s perspective on recent developments in the struggle for indigenous sovereignty goes far beyond current political, legal, and economic explanations. Focusing on the specific mechanisms through which the Potawatomi Nation has been reimagined, “national brokers,” he finds, are keys to the process, traveling between the bands, sharing information, and encouraging tribal members to work together as a nation. Language revitalization programs are critical because they promote the exchange of specific cultural knowledge, affirm the value of collective enterprise, and remind people of their place in a larger national community. At the annual Gathering of the Potawatomi Nation, participants draw on this common cultural knowledge to integrate the multiple meanings of being Potawatomi. Fittingly, the Potawatomis themselves have the last word in this book: members respond directly to Wetzel’s study, providing readers with a unique opportunity to witness the conversations that shape the ever-evolving Potawatomi Nation. Combining social and cultural history with firsthand observations, Gathering the Potawatomi Nation advances both scholarly and popular dialogues about Native nationhood. Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Saint Philippine Duchesne and four religious companions of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus came from France to Louisiana in 1818 with the express desire of working among Native Americans to bring them knowledge of the love of Jesus Christ for them. After many years of educating the children of European settlers, Philippine finally realized her dream when she was sent to an encampment of the Potawatomi at Sugar Creek, Kansas. Her time among them was limited to one year; however, her sisters, the Religious of the Sacred Heart, continued to work among the Potawatomi for thirty-eight more years. This book is a carefully researched account of the life and work of these sisters among the Native Americans, the difficulties of adaptation of European women to frontier conditions, and the movement across Kansas with their people as the Potawatomi were pushed westward. Although the life of Saint Philippine has been studied extensively, until Maureen Chicoine undertook the research for this book, no complete account of the mission of the Society of the Sacred Heart to the Potawatomi existed. The book will shed light on a little known apostolic ministry of the Society in America in the nineteenth century.

Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities’ ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

The Potawatomi Indians were the dominant tribe in the region of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and southern Michigan during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Active participants in the fur trade, and close friends with many French fur traders and government leaders, the Potawatomis remained loyal to New France throughout the colonial period, resisting the lure of the inexpensive British trade goods that enticed some of their neighbors into alliances with the British. During the colonial wars Potawatomi warriors journeyed far to the south and east to fight alongside their French allies against Braddock in Pennsylvania and other British forces in New York. As French fortunes in the Old Northwest declined, the Potawatomis reluctantly shifted their allegiance to the British Crown, fighting against the Americans during the Revolution, during Tecumseh’s uprising, and during the War of 1812. The advancing tide of white settlement in the Potawatomi lands after the wars brought many problems for the tribe. Resisting attempts to convert them into farmers, they took on the life-style of their old friends, the French traders. Raids into western territories by more warlike members of the tribe brought strong military reaction from the United States government and from white settlers in the new territories. Finally, after great pressure by government officials, the Potawatomis were forced to cede their homelands to the United States in exchange for government annuities. Although many of the treaties were fraudulent, government agents forced the tribe to move west of the Mississippi, often with much turmoil and suffering. This volume, the first scholarly history of the Potawatomis and their influence in the Old Northwest, is an important contribution to American Indian history. Many of the tribe’s leaders, long forgotten, such as Main Poc, Siggenauk, Onanghisse, Five Medals, and Billy Caldwell, played key roles in the development of Indian-white relations in the Great Lakes region. The Potawatomi experience also sheds light on the development of later United States policy toward Indians of many other tribes.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“Sets the record straight about the War of 1812’s Battle of Fort Dearborn and its significance to early Chicago’s evolution . . . informative, ambitious” (Publishers Weekly). In August 1812, Capt. Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors, who killed fifty-two members of Heald’s party and burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages. In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. She tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict, highlighting such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrating that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. This gripping account of the birth of Chicago “opens up a fascinating vista of lost American history” and will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins (The Wall Street Journal). “Laid out with great insight and detail . . . Keating . . . doesn’t see the attack 200 years ago as a massacre. And neither do many historians and Native American leaders.” —Chicago Tribune “Adds depth and breadth to an understanding of the geographic, social, and political transitions that occurred on the shores of Lake Michigan in the early 1800s.” —Journal of American History

Russell P. Strange "Book of the Year" Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2012. On the eve of the War of 1812, the Illinois Territory was a new land of bright promise. Split off from Indiana Territory in 1809, the new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Michigan. The extreme southern part of the region was rich in timber, but the dominant feature of the landscape was the vast tall grass prairie that stretched without major interruption from Lake Michigan for more than three hundred miles to the south. The territory was largely inhabited by Indians: Sauk, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and others. By 1812, however, pioneer farmers had gathered in the wooded fringes around prime agricultural land, looking out over the prairies with longing and trepidation. Six years later, a populous Illinois was confident enough to seek and receive admission as a state in the Union. What had intervened was the War of 1812, in which white settlers faced both Indians resistant to their encroachments and British forces poised to seize control of the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes. The war ultimately broke the power and morale of the Indian tribes and deprived them of the support of their ally, Great Britain. Sometimes led by skillful tacticians, at other times by blundering looters who got lost in the tall grass, the combatants showed each other little mercy. Until and even after the war was concluded by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, there were massacres by both sides, laying the groundwork for later betrayal of friendly and hostile tribes alike and for ultimate expulsion of the Indians from the new state of Illinois. In this engrossing new history, published upon the war's bicentennial, Gillum Ferguson underlines the crucial importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Illinois as a state. The history of Illinois in the War of 1812 has never before been told with so much attention to the personalities who fought it, the events that defined it, and its lasting consequences. Endorsed by the Illinois Society of the War of 1812 and the Illinois War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission.

Compilation of texts of agreements of the U.S. Government and the various Indian tribes in chronological sequence.