Description
Book SynopsisAn Infinity of Nations tells the story of the indigenous peoples who ruled the western interior of North America, focusing in particular on the Great Lakes and Northern Great Plains.
Trade Review"Witgen implores readers to reimagine native peoples as agents of their own destiny well into the nineteenth century. As such,
An Infinity of Nations invites scholars to reconsider crucial tenets of early American history." *
Journal of American History *
"An important and original history,
An Infinity of Nations should lead ethnohistorians to reinterrogate other North American regions for indigenous categories of social and political organization that may have been more important, and more fluid, than Europeans understood." *
Ethnohistory *
"
An Infinity of Nations is a bold and altogether original examination of Indian-European relations, indigenous social formation, and European imperialism. Though centered on the western Great Lakes and northwestern interior in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the book travels far and wide geographically, chronologically, and thematically-to Iroquoia in the East, Hudson Bay in the North, the prairie-plains in the West, and Ohio Country in the South. Witgen also reaches deep into the past to place the events of the late 1600s in a long historical context of evolving indigenous North America, and he takes the story into the early nineteenth century, showing how, as it expanded westward, the United States collided with a long-evolving and fully formed indigenous world. A sophisticated study of a different kind of colonial world where kinship ties, mediation, small gestures, and right words signified and brought power." * Pekka Hämäläinen, author of
The Comanche Empire *
Table of ContentsPrologue: The Long Invisibility of the Native New World
PART I. DISCOVERY
Chapter 1. Place and Belonging in Native North America
Chapter 2. The Rituals of Possession and the Problems of Nation
PART II. THE NEW WORLD
Chapter 3. The Rebirth of Native Power and Identity
Chapter 4. European Interlopers and the Politics of the Native New World
PART III. THE ILLUSION OF EMPIRE
Chapter 5. An Anishinaabe Warrior's World
Chapter 6. The Great Peace and Unraveling Alliances
PART IV. SOVEREIGNTY: THE MAKING OF NORTH AMERICA'S NEW NATIONS
Chapter 7. The Counterfactual History of Indian Assimilation
Epilogue: Louis Riel, Native Founding Father
Glossary of Native Terms
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
