Search results for ""author michael leroy oberg""

Born in 1788, Eleazer Williams was raised in the Catholic Iroquois settlement of Kahnawake along the St. Lawrence River. According to some sources, he was the descendant of a Puritan minister whose daughter was taken by French and Mohawk raiders; in other tales he was the Lost Dauphin, second son to Louis XVI of France. Williams achieved regional renown as a missionary to the Oneida Indians in central New York; he was also instrumental in their removal, allying with white federal officials and the Ogden Land Company to persuade Oneidas to relocate to Wisconsin. Williams accompanied them himself, making plans to minister to the transplanted Oneidas, but he left the community and his young family for long stretches of time. A fabulist and sometime confidence man, Eleazer Williams is notoriously difficult to comprehend: his own record is complicated with stories he created for different audiences. But for author Michael Leroy Oberg, he is an icon of the self-fashioning and protean identity practiced by native peoples who lived or worked close to the centers of Anglo-American power. Professional Indian follows Eleazer Williams on this odyssey across the early American republic and through the shifting spheres of the Iroquois in an era of dispossession. Oberg describes Williams as a "professional Indian," who cultivated many political interests and personas in order to survive during a time of shrinking options for native peoples. He was not alone: as Oberg shows, many Indians became missionaries and settlers and played a vital role in westward expansion. Through the larger-than-life biography of Eleazer Williams, Professional Indian uncovers how Indians fought for place and agency in a world that was rapidly trying to erase them.

Read more less

Many know the name Uncas only from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, but the historical Uncas flourished as an important leader of the Mohegan people in seventeenth-century Connecticut. In Uncas: First of the Mohegans, Michael Leroy Oberg integrates the life story of an important Native American sachem into the broader story of European settlement in America. The arrival of the English in Connecticut in the 1630s upset the established balance among the region's native groups and brought rapid economic and social change. Oberg argues that Uncas's methodical and sustained strategies for adapting to these changes made him the most influential Native American leader in colonial New England. Emerging from the damage wrought by epidemic disease and English violence, Uncas transformed the Mohegans from a small community along the banks of the Thames River in Connecticut into a regional power in southern New England. Uncas learned quickly how to negotiate between cultures in the conflicts that developed as natives and newcomers, Indians and English, maneuvered for access to and control of frontier resources. With English assistance, Uncas survived numerous assaults and plots hatched by his native rivals. Unique among Indian leaders in early America, Uncas maintained his power over large numbers of tributary and other native communities in the region, lived a long life, and died a peaceful death (without converting to Christianity) in his people's traditional homeland. Oberg finds that although the colonists considered Uncas "a friend to the English," he was first and foremost an assertive guardian of Mohegan interests.

Read more less

The latest edition of an accessible and comprehensive survey of Native America In this newly revised third edition of Native America: A History, Michael Leroy Oberg and Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich deliver a thoroughly updated, incisive narrative history of North America’s Indigenous peoples. The authors aim to provide readers with an overview of the principal themes and developments in Native American history, from the first peopling of the continent to the present, by following twelve Native communities whose histories serve as exemplars for the common experiences of North America’s diverse Indigenous nations. This textbook centers the history of Native America and presents it as flowing through channels distinct from those of the United States. This is a history of nations not merely acted upon, but rather of those that have responded to, resisted, ignored, and shaped the efforts of foreign powers to control their story. This new edition has been comprehensively updated in all its chapters and expanded with wider coverage of the most significant recent events and trends in Native America through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Native America: A History, Third Edition also includes: A survey of pre-Columbian North American traditions and the various ways in which these traditions were deployed to comprehend and respond to the arrival of Europeans. In-depth examinations of how Native nations navigated the challenges of colonialism and fought to survive while marginalized behind the frontiers of European empires and the United States. Nuanced analyses of how Indigenous peoples balanced the economic benefits offered by assimilation with the cultural and political imperatives of maintaining traditions and sovereignty. An accessible presentation of American tribal law and the strategies used by Native nations to establish government-to-government relationships with the United States despite the repeated failures of that state to honor its legal commitments. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students seeking a broad historical treatment of Indigenous peoples in the United States, Native America: A History, Third Edition will earn a place in the libraries of anyone with an interest in seeking an authoritative and engaging survey of Native American history.

Read more less