Prophecy and Shamanism in the Great Lakes Region

David Nichols Blog Post

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. The Master of Life had separately created white people and red people (the latter a

Agency, Culpability, and the Fox Wars

David Nichols Blog Post

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. Following Rushforth, McDonnell argues that the