The Turtle Island Examiner

The second half of the eighteenth century became an age of prophecy in northeastern Native North America. Delaware and Seneca prophets visited the Master of Life in dream visions, Shawnee conjurers summoned avatars of the Great Spirit, and Ojibwa shamans sought guidance from the larger spirit world, whose denizens they invited to dwell in their bodies and minds. Most of these truth-seekers delivered from the spiritual plane a common message: whites and their lifeways threatened the well being of all Indians.

I've just started digging into Masters of Empire, Michael McDonnell's new history of the Odawas, and I suspect it will become an influential work. The book boasts highly competent research, clarity of style, and an appealing argument: that the Anishinaabeg, not the French or British, called the political shots in the eighteenth-century Great Lakes country. In partial support of his thesis, McDonnell employs Brett Rushforth's interpretation of the Fox Wars, the most pronounced episode of internecine violence in the “French-era” Lakes region.

The Potawatomis, southernmost nation of the Three Fires confederacy, held a melancholy record as parties to the largest number of treaties with the U.S. government. Between 1826 and 1837, Potawatomi leaders signed 21 of these accords, an average of nearly two every year, deeding thereby virtually all of their land to the United States.

Your Humble Narrator first became interested in the medieval Norse encounter with Native Americans when he read Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby's now-classic study of the role invasive species played in Europe’s colonial expansion. Crosby told a story of violence and failure, of Norse colonists who fought with and alienated the “skraelings” (their word for the Beothuks, Miqmaqs, and Inuit), and who failed to introduce the biological weapons, namely horses and smallpox, that would have let them conquer the mainland.

This year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Ethnohistory (November 4-8) unveiled a new wave of scholarship dedicated to immanently important themes and issues within Native American history. While the following panels represent only a fraction of the papers presented at the conference, the connections between the presenters and their research were remarkably similar. In particular, an emphasis on language and communication, along with space and place, emerged as recurring motifs throughout the meeting.

Thanksgiving evokes complex emotions for many Americans. The holiday has much symbolic and emotional work to accomplish: it is a celebration of families (however dysfunctional), a harvest festival, an occasion for civic parades, a last rest before entering the Christmas shopping gauntlet, and an official holiday (for most of us) from work and school.

Longtime readers of The Economist, and you know you're out there, may recall the magazine's May 2011 cover story “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” The essay introduced many readers both to a neologism and to a new idea: that human beings have so profoundly altered the Earth's atmosphere, soil chemistry, and fossil record as to have left permanent physical evidence of their presence.