Red Dreams White Nightmares

From the end of Pontiac’s War in 1763 through the War of 1812, fear—even paranoia—drove Anglo-American Indian policies. In Red Dreams, White Nightmares, Robert M. Owens views conflicts between whites and Natives in this era—invariably treated as discrete, regional affairs—as the inextricably related struggles they were. As this book makes clear, the Indian wars north of the Ohio River make sense only within the context of Indians’ efforts to recruit their southern cousins to their cause. The massive threat such alliances posed, recognized by contemporary whites from all walks of life, prompted a terror that proved a major factor in the formulation of Indian and military policy in North America. Indian unity, especially in the form of military alliance, was the most consistent, universal fear of Anglo-Americans in the late colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. This fear was so pervasive—and so useful for unifying whites—that Americans exploited it long after the threat of a general Indian alliance had passed. As the nineteenth century wore on, and as slavery became more widespread and crucial to the American South, fears shifted to Indian alliances with former slaves, and eventually to slave rebellion in general. The growing American nation needed and utilized a rhetorical threat from the other to justify the uglier aspects of empire building—a phenomenon that Owens tracks through a vast array of primary sources. Drawing on eighteen different archives, covering four nations and eleven states, and on more than six-dozen period newspapers—and incorporating the views of British and Spanish authorities as well as their American rivals—Red Dreams, White Nightmares is the most comprehensive account ever written of how fear, oftentimes resulting in “Indian-hating,” directly influenced national policy in early America.

From the end of Pontiac's War in 1763 through the War of 1812, fear--even paranoia--drove Anglo-American Indian policies. In Red Dreams, White Nightmares, Robert M. Owens views conflicts between whites and Natives in this era--invariably treated as discrete, regional affairs--as the inextricably related struggles they were. As this book makes clear, the Indian wars north of the Ohio River make sense only within the context of Indians' efforts to recruit their southern cousins to their cause. The massive threat such alliances posed, recognized by contemporary whites from all walks of life, prompted a terror that proved a major factor in the formulation of Indian and military policy in North America. Indian unity, especially in the form of military alliance, was the most consistent, universal fear of Anglo-Americans in the late colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods. This fear was so pervasive--and so useful for unifying whites--that Americans exploited it long after the threat of a general Indian alliance had passed. As the nineteenth century wore on, and as slavery became more widespread and crucial to the American South, fears shifted to Indian alliances with former slaves, and eventually to slave rebellion in general. The growing American nation needed and utilized a rhetorical threat from the other to justify the uglier aspects of empire building--a phenomenon that Owens tracks through a vast array of primary sources. Drawing on eighteen different archives, covering four nations and eleven states, and on more than six-dozen period newspapers--and incorporating the views of British and Spanish authorities as well as their American rivals--Red Dreams, White Nightmares is the most comprehensive account ever written of how fear, oftentimes resulting in "Indian-hating," directly influenced national policy in early America.

As much as the Civil War was a battle over the survival of the United States, for the men of Company K of the First Michigan Sharpshooters, it was also one battle in a longer struggle for the survival of Anishinaabewaki, the homelands of the Anishinaabeg—Ojibwe, Odawa, and Boodewaadamii peoples . The men who served in what was often called ‘the Indian Company’ chose to enlist in the Union army to contribute to their peoples’ ongoing struggle with the state and federal governments over status, rights, resources, and land in the Great Lakes. This meticulously researched history begins in 1763 with Pontiac’s War, a key moment in Anishinaabe history. It then explores the multiple strategies the Anishinaabeg deployed to remain in Michigan despite federal pressure to leave. Anishinaabe men claimed the rights and responsibilities associated with male citizenship—voting, owning land, and serving in the army—while actively preserving their status as ‘Indians’ and Anishinaabe peoples. Indigenous expectations of the federal government, as well as religious and social networks, shaped individuals’ decisions to join the U.S. military. The stories of Company K men also broaden our understanding of the complex experiences of Civil War soldiers. In their fight against removal, dispossession, political marginalization, and loss of resources in the Great Lakes, the Anishinaabeg participated in state and national debates over citizenship, allegiance, military service, and the government’s responsibilities to veterans and their families.

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Life of the Indigenous Mind David Martínez examines the early activism, life, and writings of Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005), the most influential indigenous activist and writer of the twentieth century and one of the intellectual architects of the Red Power movement. An experienced activist, administrator, and political analyst, Deloria was motivated to activism and writing by his work as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, and he came to view discourse on tribal self-determination as the most important objective for making a viable future for tribes. In this work of both intellectual and activist history, Martínez assesses the early life and legacy of Deloria’s “Red Power Tetralogy,” his most powerful and polemical works: Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), We Talk, You Listen (1970), God Is Red (1973), and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974). Deloria’s gift for combining sharp political analysis with a cutting sense of humor rattled his adversaries as much as it delighted his growing readership. Life of the Indigenous Mind reveals how Deloria’s writings addressed Indians and non-Indians alike. It was in the spirit of protest that Deloria famously and infamously confronted the tenets of Christianity, the policies of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the theories of anthropology. The concept of tribal self-determination that he initiated both overturned the presumptions of the dominant society, including various “Indian experts,” and asserted that tribes were entitled to the rights of independent sovereign nations in their relationship with the United States, be it legally, politically, culturally, historically, or religiously.

"In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a 'long continued course of aggression and sufferings' between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, 'aggression' and 'sufferings' are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the eastern woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white Southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white Southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South.This, in turn, formed the development of Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, 'Aggression and Sufferings' prioritizes events in the frontier territories of Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the emergent region and examines the involved societies' conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Nooe then investigates the contemporary and historically interconnected consequences of a series of murders of encroaching white settlers by a faction of the Creek nation known as the 'Red Sticks' in the years preceding the 1813 Creek War. Each episode was connected to immediate grievances by Native Southerners against white colonialism, while white Southerners looked upon the incidents as confirmation of Native savagery. Nooe considers the effort by the burgeoning white population to combat the Red Sticks in the Creek War of 1813-1814 and explains how chroniclers of the white South's past memorialized the 1813 Creek War as a regional conflict. Next, Nooe explores the events between the August 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson to the September 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek to evaluate the implications of persistent low-level white-Native conflict in a period traditionally interpreted as the end to the Creek War. He then examines how the Florida Indians' resistance to their expulsion from the South sparked a unifying call to arms from white communities across the region. Finally, Nooe explores how white Southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as innocent victims in the violent expulsion of the region's Native peoples before concluding with notes on how this emerging sense of regional history and identity (which ignored the interests and agency of enslaved and free Black people in the early nineteenth century South) continued to flower into the Antebellum period, during Western expansion, and well into the twentieth century. Readers interested in Southern, Indigenous, and Early American history will find a thorough, scholarly examination of the tensions and violence between Natives and white settlers and the construction of a regional memory of white victimization by white Southerners during this period. 'Aggression and Sufferings' speaks to scholarship on settler-colonialism, violence, Native dispossession, white identity, historical memory and monuments, and Southern Studies"--

During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a "mania." In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza--a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of acres from Maine to the Mississippi and Georgia to the Great Lakes. Patriot leaders staked the success of their revolution on the seizure and public sale of Native American territory. Initially, they hoped that fledgling state and national governments could pay the hefty costs of the War for Independence and extend a republican society of propertied citizens by selling expropriated land directly to white farmers. But those democratic plans quickly ran aground of a series of obstacles, including an economic depression and the ability of many Native nations to repel U.S. invasion. Wily merchants, lawyers, planters, and financiers rushed into the breach. Scrambling to profit off future expansion, they lobbied governments to convey massive tracts for pennies an acre, hounded revolutionary veterans to sell their land bounties for a pittance, and marketed the rustic ideal of a yeoman's republic--the early American dream--while waiting for land values to rise. When the land business crashed in the late 1790s, scores of "land mad" speculators found themselves imprisoned for debt or declaring bankruptcy. But through their visionary schemes and corrupt machinations, U.S. speculators and statesmen had spawned a distinctive and enduring form of settler colonialism: a financialized frontier, which transformed vast swaths of contested land into abstract commodities. Speculation Nation reveals how the era of land mania made Native dispossession a founding premise of the American republic and ultimately rooted the United States' "empire of liberty" in speculative capitalism.

The drafting and ratification of the federal constitution between 1787 and 1788 capped almost 30 years of revolutionary turmoil and warfare. The supporters of the new constitution, known at the time as Federalists, looked to the new national government to secure the achievements of the Revolution. But they shared the same doubts that the Anti-federalists had voiced about whether the republican form of government could be made to work on a continental scale. Nor was it a foregone conclusion that the new government would succeed in overcoming parochial interests to weld the separate states into a single nation. During the next four decades the institutions and precedents governing the behavior of the national government took shape, many of which are still operative today. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Early American Republic contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about American history.