Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792” (UNC Press, 2018)

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Dr. Sleepersmith is the author of several books and articles, including Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792, which has just been published by the Amahandro Institute at the University of North Carolina Press and which we'll be talking about today. Susan, welcome to the new books network. Oh, thank you, I'm glad to be here. Why don't we begin by just hearing about you? What path did you take to becoming a professional historian? Well, it's a rather complicated path because basically I worked first for a number of years in historic preservation and when I moved from Rochester, New York to the Midwest, historic preservation was not one of the priorities here and I decided to go back to graduate school. And so I went back to graduate school at the University of Michigan and spent a number of years there and had always wanted to go back to graduate school. Many years ago I started at Wisconsin, but did not enjoy it. I hate to say this about Wisconsin, but did not enjoy it that much and decided instead to choose another career path. So I went back to school after probably working in historic preservation for 10 or 15 years and it was, has been incredibly rewarding. I'm going to ask you real quick because I grew up in Rochester, actually, we'll have to talk more about that off Mike a little bit, but I'm curious if you would tell us where in Rochester did you work in historic preservation? Well, I worked for the landmarks commission and then I became so interested in it, I opened up my own historic preservation research firm and I proceeded to eventually hire a crew of people and we did a number of restorations in Rochester. And then probably I had about nine or 10 people working for me and decided truthfully burnt out after doing it for about 10 years and decided that I needed to find another career path. So the move from the University of Rochester to Michigan State for my husband was an ideal opportunity for me to then go back and pursue a PhD in history. Let's talk more generally about the topic of the Ohio River Valley. How did you become interested in this region and this topic and what drew you specifically to the history of women and material culture in the colonial era Ohio River Valley? Okay, well, part of it is when I went back to graduate school, I did a field in history. I also did a field in art history and I did a field in historic preservation and architecture. So I had a number of fields outside and I've always been very interested in material culture. Part of what interested me is when I was working on my first book Indian Women and French Women, I happened to cross some incredibly rich archives down at a very little known archive in West Lafayette, Indiana, the typical New County Historical Society. And it was primarily a series of journals kept by an English artist who had moved to America man by the name of George Winter and also the archive housed a huge number of his watercolors and what fascinated me about the Ohio River Valley and this was really when I was working on Indian women in the Great Lakes. But I knew I could use some of these because winter had captured images of many of the Indians that had come into the Ohio River Valley to trade. But there are several hundred sketches that winter did as well as some beautiful watercolors. And what he did was to keep in his journal, he would use a sketchbook and then he would use his journal to record all the details and the colors of Indian dress. And it became this fascinating project of having an incredibly different view of the Ohio River Valley instead of a view of ongoing warfare and Indian demise was really an incredible portrait of just how very prosperous the Indians were, the American Indians were who lived in the Ohio River Valley and from when I started my first book, I really had started again as I was working on it to gather information about the Ohio River Valley and I knew eventually I wanted to write something that captured the sentiment of what life was like for well over a hundred years before most of that was destroyed really by incoming American settlers. And the book for our listeners that probably don't necessarily have it in front of them, it's full of a number of really astounding and vibrant images of the kind that you're talking about that really do capture that sense of prosperity very well. It was really a wonderful book, I mean I read it but it's very nice just to kind of flip through as well and look at all the nice pictures in there too. Oh, I know and you know the thing about I was so lucky because I received a grant from Michigan State that under wrote the cost of the pictures and of the color pictures that are in this hardback version and it does it you see them often you see pictures of Indian clothing and you often see it in black and white but you don't have any understanding of the incredibly rich colors and the textures, we're kind of very fortunate here in this area of the Great Lakes because we have a number of archives that actually really secured many of these items of clothing in the early 19th century. And so the DIA places like the Cranbrook Institute, I take my students there often and they're absolutely astounded. The Cranbrook is amazing because they've allowed my students to go back in and to not just look at the clothing but to put gloves on and to feel the weight of the clothing and what it looked like in all the credible silver artifacts that went with it and there is an incredibly different sense of what Indian life was like. I mean it's an incredible experience to share with other people and then I was also very fortunate because I've received a number of travel grants from Michigan State. They've been very generous and I've gone to see so much of the clothing which is housed in Europe and you can see items from clothing in Berlin museums, there's an incredible amount of clothing in many of the German museums but also in Vienna, in Barcelona, in Italy. And particularly England also has a huge amount of clothing and we kind of lost the sense of that. We don't see that prosperity very much from that early period. So to me it's fascinating but some of it comes from my own interest in material culture. Well let's get into some of the arguments that you make in the book. And Indigenous societies in the Ohio River Valley have for a very long time been characterized as the phrase goes by living off the hunt primarily which you are you in the book is misleading. So my question is why have historians gotten this story so wrong and how should our image of these people in that particular place be corrected? Well, I think it's a very image. is come primarily from records that people read. If you're looking at the French period in the Ohio River Valley, most of the things that people read to understand that French period up until 1760 are archived colonial, which are the French records for this region. And it's common dance who are writing to the governor general, and those are being sent on to to Versailles in France. And they are people who are invested in describing a world torn apart by warfare. The more troops you could have to support your center for trade or your fort or the more goods they could ship you the more successfully you can engage in the trade. And they're almost every French come and down is actively engaged in the fur trade. They have an investment in making Indians a pure world-like. And every once in a while you do come across incredible journal entries of people who are not common dance or who are very briefly common dance who travel through the Ohio River Valley. People pay little attention to those records. Their journal entries, they're often short, maybe a letter to Versailles of 10 or 11 pages in French. Historians on the whole don't read French. And so a lot of what has been depicted for the Ohio River Valley is really this belief that the Iroquois invaded the Ohio River Valley drove all the people who lived in the Ohio River Valley west to Green Bay. They don't have a sense that trade was already taking place in the Ohio River Valley and that although some Indians many Indians in fact took refuge at Green Bay there was still a sizable population in the Ohio River Valley. Some of that does take running through and carefully examining French records. It also means often reading against the grain in records that are already there. If a common dance is describing how bad it is but he's purchasing a thousand bushels of grain from Indians you know that it is not an impoverished region. It's a very rich region. And that actually leads nicely into my next question and I'm wondering if you could paint a picture for us of what the Ohio River Valley was like in the 16th and 17th centuries. How vibrant and as you put it how rich was this region in terms of life in terms of agriculture in terms of ecologies generally. I think it's a very rich region. I mean I think one of the things when you look at the fur trade records carefully is the black swamp which stretches from Toledo west to the Miami River to the Moomee to that whole region south of Lake Erie connected up to the Moomee. That's 120 miles of swamp land. It's some of the richest wetlands and swamp lands in the Americas. In addition what you find is that there are a large number of tributary rivers that come off the Ohio. Those tributary rivers feed into Lake Erie, feed into the lakes surrounding south of Detroit. That whole area is wetlands that's incredibly rich with fertile lands. It's an interesting region. It has a climate that tends to be conducive to two growing seasons. So it's not just one growing season but two growing seasons. We find that Indian people in the Ohio River Valley are tremendous harvesters of wetlands plants. Probably 40 to 60% of their diet comes from the plants they harvest from adjacent wetlands. You have buffalo or bison in the Ohio River Valley. You have an endless supply of meat. This is by far not a region where people are impoverished and the fur trade is going to lead to very prosperous villages. You also have not a declining population in the Ohio River Valley but an expanding population. You have a population of many Eastern Indians who move into the Ohio River Valley. The Shawnee return, the Delaware move into the Ohio River Valley. The Mejiquan move into the Ohio River Valley. You have large numbers of what I would call inter-ethnic villages. The Miami are settled next to the Delaware. The Delaware are settled next to the Shawnee. You go along the warbash. You have it probably at the end of the 17th century. You had maybe a dozen villages within 20 to 40 years than those villages double in number. They are prosperous. They all are taking furs from the black swamp and from adjacent woodland swamps and they are trading them at Detroit and in fact when it switches from French control to British hegemony in the Ohio River Valley, the British are able to secure more profits from the fur trade in Detroit than they do at Michelin Mackinill. That really says something about this region and its prosperity. This is a book about a place about the Ohio River Valley. It's about imperial and native diplomacy and geopolitics but as it says in the title it's also a book about Indian women. Could you tell us what role did women play in the fur trade and how did they play a central in creating as you put it in the book a golden age of indigenous prosperity? The one I think of women in the fur trade is probably more misunderstood than any other part of the fur trade. The fur trade just has for a very long time been seen as a male world despite the work of very early or historians like Jennifer Brown and Sylvie Van Kirk. Basically the fur trade I would call it almost the cloth trade over 70% of the goods coming into the River Valley are cloth. Women transform cloth into clothing but women are also the processors of fur. Men do the trapping of fur because Indian men basically can handle things like the death of animals and that whole issue of blood. Women however are the processors of those fur's and their skill in processing those fur's is a skill that's passed down from generation to generation. It's like the making of clothing. It's passed down from generation to generation and all of the fur's that are processed that wind up in French on hands or in British hands are processed by women not by men. Women's ability to process fur gives them control over what they want in exchange and that exchange is simply cloth and later on it's going to encompass large quantities of silver, broaches, silver earrings, silver that decorates everyone's clothing in the Ohio River Valley. Women also early during the French period are the people who bring French traders into their homes. The French banned the Ferdinand. trade at the end of the 17th century because they have too much fur in peltry in their houses at Detroit, the supply houses, that warehouses that hold the fur. And so they close the trade and that means all the traders who are left in the west or decide to stay are illegal. In the 18th century, many of those French fur traders are taken in by Indian women. Many of them form marital alliances with Indian women. Many of them are long-range. They don't return to Montreal. It's illegal to return to Montreal until round 1716. The fur trade is closed for almost two decades. It means that French fur traders become more Indian than French. And this, in a sense, gives women greater control over the exchange process. And so women play a very crucial role in the Ohio River Valley. They are not only the suppliers of food, but they're the processors of fur, and they are involved actively in the exchange process. So it's a very different type of fur trade. It's not a sub-artic fur trade that you find in the north, north of Lake Superior. This is a totally different type of trade. And what's being traded is not so much beaver as it is the other fur bearing animals that are so prolific in the Ohio River Valley. That's not beaver, but it's otter, it's muskrat, it's black raccoon, it's regular raccoon. It's all type of fur bearing animals. And that's what women are processing, not as much beaver as other animals. As you've made clear so far, the arguments that you're making in this book are both at once historical and historical graphical. And I don't want to belabor this point too much, but I'm really curious why you think historians have, by and large, missed this centrality of Indian women in the Great Lakes fur trade so far. Well, I think two reasons. I think gender comes out of social history. It's looking at what's going on through a gendered lens. I think that is a relatively new discipline. And I think the second part of this book is also part of a relatively new discipline. And that's environmental history. If you take the two together, if you look at the environment in which Indian villages were located in the Ohio River Valley, and you really look at it through the lens of gender, you come up with a very different portrait of what this region looks like. But environmental history and gender history have not been around for a long time. It's a new way of looking at things. It does come out of social history. It's looking at it from the bottom up, not from the top down. And I think it's much easier for many historians to look at history from the top down to read all of those records and to not look for those other signs in the environment. So as we said at the top of the podcast, this book contains really an array of wonderful pictures. And again, it's kind of unfortunate because podcasting is obviously an audio medium. But still, if you could describe a little bit, tell us how Indians, both men and women demonstrated their 17th and 18th century prosperity through clothing and jewelry. You mentioned silver, for instance, earlier. I'm curious about that and how it demonstrated their prosperity. Okay, well, let's kind of talk about the clothing a little bit. One of the things that I find very interesting is the George Winter when he's describing this clothing. I mean, one of the things that George Winter would do is he'd go and he'd make sketches of Indians that he'd met either along the road where he'd visit nearby villages. He would often go some distance to capture Indians and engaged in everyday activity. Not people engaged so much even in sacred events, but rather the daily life of Indians. And he describes in detail what they were. He describes the leggings that both Indian men and Indian women wore. And those leggings were made from brood cloth, from strouts, from very heavy material during the winter months that were cloth that was tended to be water repellent. But they weren't content just to have leggings. They would sew decorative ribbons, silk ribbons along the length of those leggings, both men and women. And then they would take pieces of material, what we call cut work. And they would take out little diamond shape pieces of material and sew them onto the leggings. So the leggings itself almost look like they have rings on them. They're very elaborate. Both men and women wore blouses, long blouses that sometimes they would belt, sometimes they would allow to be free. And those blouses were generally made from very substantial calico and were highly colored. The calico was manufactured specifically. The strouts were too specifically for the Indian trade. And so you had these long blouses. Now what they would do is they would acquire silver broaches. They also acquired earbabs, they acquired headbands, they all manner of elaborate silver. And there were quite a number of silversmiths in the Ohio River Valley at Detroit that catered to the Indian trade. And basically women, not men, but women would take the broaches and line the top of blouses with them so that they almost look like shawls. And then around their heads and you might wear a very long shawl. And it would be embroidered often with what we call tinkling bells. And women would also tie tinkling bells around their ankles. And so you have silver decorating women later on when Indians were removed. They would also use those broaches as a kind of money to be able to buy food along the way. Men, a lot of men also wore turbans. This is an area, a time at which in the 18th century. You see a phenomenal amount of Indian dress that begins to look the same. So that what Indians are doing in the Ohio River Valley, much of that clothing may be made by women and exchanged at treaty conferences among Indians. We also know that there are some Indian women engaged in the fur trade who are also seem to be commissioning clothing to sell to traders who are then using them as gifts. So you find traders at Detroit during the English period sending on to British officials gifts from the Ohio River Valley that are often elaborate types of shawls or blankets that have been decorated. You even find them sending robes, bison robes that a lot of Europeans used to keep themselves warm when they rode in their carriages. So all much of that material is coming out of the Ohio River Valley. Clothing actually becomes part of an economic exchange in the 18th century and much of it being manufactured in the Ohio River Valley. So you go ahead. I was just going to say as you point out in the book, you know, perhaps nothing better underscores the prosperity of these indigenous societies than the fact that often the clothing, the garb and the fashion of Indian men and women, stood in stark contrast to the rather drab clothing that settlers were wearing. Oh yes. I mean, can you imagine, in a sense, Americans coming into the Ohio River Valley, one expecting it to be empty, and then two, coming across Indians that look like this, and actually one of the saddest parts of the book and the most difficult for me to write, was about all of the Kentucky raids that took place on Indian villages. People who joined the militia were often paid from the results of public auctions that were held at the end of those raids, so you would have the Kentucky militia invading villages in the southern part of the Wabash River Valley, in the southern part of where the Miami touches down the Miami River. They didn't come too far north because it became more difficult, and Indians were prepared for them, but they would raid many of those villages, and then at the end of the raid, they would divide the spoils that came from public auction, and you find those public auctions, you find garments being auctioned in which there are a thousand silver broaches, and the broaches would often be auctioned in lots of five or ten, but it gave you some idea of how prosperous these villages were that they became the object of squatters, often, in Kentucky who had very little money, but who had a gun, and who could join with other militia members to raid these villages. It gives you the feeling of the dangers that Indians faced when Americans, particularly during the Revolutionary War, started squatting on what would eventually be Kentucky lands, but those people became very dangerous to prosperous Indian villages. Well, you provided a bit of a preview, but tell us more about what American victory in the Revolutionary War meant for the Miami and the Shawnee and other indigenous societies in the Ohio River Valley. Two things, I don't see the Ohio River Valley, particularly the western side. The eastern side is going to be very, very different, and I think that Rob Harpo's recently written unsettling the west talks really about the eastern side of the Ohio River Valley, where that's where the first land company, particularly the Ohio Company, attempted to settle on Indian lands. After the Revolution, for Indians, they saw the barrier as the Ohio River Valley. Indian American settlers coming in referred to the lands north of the Ohio as Indian country, or the Indian shore south of the Ohio were the lands that supposedly Americans were going to settle on. What really happens is it's the war of 1812 that breaks down the defenses that's really going to open up the Ohio River Valley. A lot of people do see the Greenville Treaty as in 1894 as one of the turning points. It primarily affects the eastern part of the Ohio River Valley. The western part for a very long time until the war of 1812 remains an indigenous hands. Indians are pushed north, there's no doubt about it, pushed further north along the tributary rivers. They settle in swamp lands where frankly they're quite happy to live. They often choose swamp lands near oak openings so they can still, women can still grow a great amount of corn, but the wetlands allow them to remain fur traders and the fur trade becomes the raccoon trade. It doesn't die until the end of the 19th century, but after the war of 1812, you really begin to see the forcible removal of Indians from the Ohio River Valley. The American takeover of the Ohio River Valley is a disaster for Indians. It is gradual at first and Indians are capable because of their prosperity and because of a lying, allying with the British, they are capable of resisting, but that resistance really breaks down after the war of 1812. And those Indians who remain in the Ohio River Valley, and truthfully, there are quite a number of them. They don't go away. I have called them hiding in plain sight. They are there. They are engaged in the fur trade. They settle on lands that Americans don't want. About the same time as the war of 1812, and many of the rich farmlands in Iowa and further west begin to open, and to some extent that really saves the swampy areas of the Ohio River Valley until the end of the 19th century. As you pointed out throughout the earlier public period, Americans are attempting to conquer and settle the Ohio River Valley and into the Great Lakes region. And part of their strategy is targeting and capturing Indian women. Why is that such a central part of the American strategy? Well, I think that George Washington recognized George Washington had been on several tours of the Ohio River Valley. He was a land speculator as was every member of Congress. And basically, I think George Washington and Colin Calloway talks about this in his new book on Washington. He recognized that much of the prosperity for Indian villages came from women's work. It was women that were the processors of first. It was the women that were the agricultural suppliers. And if you could remove and capture Indian women, you might bring those Indians to their knees. I mean, it was for Washington the same technique he had applied against the Eroquois with Sullivan's raids. He tried to do the same in the Ohio River Valley. Unfortunately, he failed in the Ohio River Valley. Indians were prepared to not fight often. And when they did fight, Washington's army met with two outstanding defeats, St. Clair's defeat, which was one of the worst defeats the American army ever suffered. It took them several years of training under Anthony Wayne to really manage to conquer those Indians in the Ohio River Valley. And even then, there were still many Indians who were not impacted by the Greenville Treaty. It did not destroy their lands. It would come later. So I am recording this podcast from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is at the very headwaters of the Ohio River. And the Ohio River Country that you describe in the book in many ways is almost unrecognizable to the Ohio River Country that I am more familiar with. So how did American conquest and settlement and how did American settler colonists change the ecology of the Ohio River Valley? And how did these changes undercut native land use practices? Well, the first thing that happens is that if you think about the Ohio River Valley as lands where there are interethnic villages, so you might have a Delaware village. And next to a Delaware village, you would find that the Delaware had settled along a tributary River on the same. true for the Miami, the same is true for the Shawnee. What you find is they settle along those rivers and they have, in a sense, a type of agrarian existence that preserves both the wildlife that you find in the forest, which assures them a solid meat supply. And you have the Ohio River Valley and all the tributaries which have an incredible number of fish in them. You have land that remains very fertile. It does not necessitate because of the way the rivers are situated Indian villages remain the same place in many years. They didn't move. When Americans come in, they're going to draw lines around their landscape. Indians recognized hunting territories, but to some sense, much of the Ohio River Valley is a shared landscape, a common pot from which people draw the resources as opposed to owning specific pieces of land. One of the things that Americans did, which we probably today, environmentally think as a disaster, is they plowed the land. They turned the soil up. They made it infertile. And that necessitated once you begin to turn the soil over with deep plows. You find that the soil loses its fertility. You have to keep on moving. You have to keep on expanding your farm. That is a disaster because it encroaches on Indian territory. Second thing they did, and Americans at the time were not even aware of it, but they thought that the bison herds, that the huge flocks of geese that lived in the area, the huge flocks of deer that lived in the area, they thought that it was endless. And so you find settlers on Autobahn lived at the falls of the Ohio. He recorded in his journal descriptions of people who would go out. And just for the sake of it, kill 50 or 60 buffalo just because they could, or shoot 300 deer just because they could. The landscape which has existed, its fertility was a result of the care and the nurturance of Indian people. Americans did things like cut down the trees. I mean the black swamp is no longer there. Ohio, in places where the black swamp was, has 80 feet of top soil. It came about because they drained the black swamp. They took all of that wildlife, they destroyed it. They cut down trees that were often 40 or 50 feet in diameter. As soon as you cut down a tree and you feed and you plow the land next to it, you make that land infertile after four or five years. And so you go from having a region that is tended very carefully, that recognizes that there are environmental limitations to one that had this idea that there was, there was no necessity to save this landscape that you could just go on in a sense abusing it. I mean you have the Ohio river which at one time would be very shallow in the summer. Sometimes people could walk across it. And you start building dams, you start restricting the water, the falls which were there, which were apparently incredibly beautiful. Those were destroyed. And when you destroy that landscape, when you take down those trees, when you plow those fields, you turn it into a landscape that's unrecognizable. It did not take industry to destroy the Ohio river valley. Unfortunately, the settler colonists that came in did a perfectly adequate job of destruction with just their plow, their rates and their shovels. Well, it's a tremendous book and you make a number of very powerful and complex arguments within. For my last question, I'm just wondering what you hope above everything else. What do you hope readers take away from Indigenous prosperity and American conquest? What I would like people to take away is the feeling that this was a world that worked very, very well. This was not, the Indian world was not a world in demise. And when we destroyed that world, we destroyed a world that we probably today would envy. Those villages were not just prosperous, but they were well integrated. This was a river valley where the Delaware could get along with the Shawnee and the Shawnee could get along with the Wea and the Wea could get along with the Kikapoo. And the Miami were exceedingly generous and they opened their lands to other people. This was an incredibly diverse culture. They incorporated Frenchmen. They incorporated British. They incorporated African American slaves that escaped into the Ohio River Valley. It was an inclusive world and it was a world which recognized environmental limitations. In a sense, I want people to take I hope from this book the sense that this was a prosperous world that we as a society unfortunately went about destroying. So I know that this book has only been out for a few months now and that you are about to embark on a new and impressive position. But I'm curious nonetheless if you have anything in mind for your next project, you know something that you might be working on in the coming not too distant future? I think I do know I have, I've had an interesting captivity narrative for a really long time and I teach a course on captivity narratives with my students and I would like to do something about them because I think we still are very interested in captivity. We've made quite a business in the 20th century of being engaged with captivity narratives and I think much of the practice arises from our interaction with Indian people and what it meant to be a white captive or to be an Indian captive. And so I'm probably going to look at captivity narratives from a different perspective. Well, I look forward to reading that. Well, it will be a long time just like this book. Susan Sleepersmith is a professor of history at Michigan State University and this coming fall will be the interim director of the Darcy McNichol Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newbury Library in Chicago. Her new book is Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley 1690 to 1792 which came out just this year with the Omohandro Institute. Susan, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It was a pleasure. I enjoyed speaking with you. 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