North America

In 1761, on the sandy shores that narrow at the straits of Michilimackinac at the heart of the Great Lakes in North America, several groups of Anishinaabe Ottawa and Ojibwe Indians waited for the arrival of a flotilla of canoes bearing a detachment of British troops and an expected emissary from the English king.

The water’s edge had long been a site of important intercultural contact between Native Americans and Europeans. Since Columbus, the cold currents of the North Atlantic seemed to serve most often as a vehicle for European penetration into and the destruction of indigenous communities. The sparse sands of the eastern seaboard of the Americas provided a fragile foothold for many a new European settlement. The extensive rivers that emptied into the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific carried Europeans deep into the continental interior, spreading diseases, alcohol and dependency on trade goods, and sparking new conflicts with an increasing number of indigenous nations. As such, these watery spaces have often been viewed as places of conflict, exclusion and division.⁴

Yet seen from the perspective of many Native Americans, the water’s edge was equally a place of resistance and refuge, creation and re-creation, alliance-making and social regen­eration.

The British, to their horror, discovered the enduring power of some of these groups shortly after their initial meetings with Anishinaabeg at Michilimackinac and at Detroit. Arriving as conquering heroes and looking for immediate obeisance after their success in the Seven Years’ War, the British soon found themselves embroiled in one of the most disastrous European wars with Native Americans. The Anglo-Indian War that began in 1763 (commonly called Pontiac’s War) had many origins, but the attitudes of the British who took over French posts in the pays d'en haut (the high country of the Great Lakes) was certainly prominent among them. Keen to restrict trade to certain posts, limit the dis­tribution of gunpowder and arms, and curtail the French practice of giving extensive pre­sents to native nations whose lands they claimed, British officers angered Native Americans. As one frustrated British Indian agent reported, the new officers too often boasted about their military superiority and power over their new ‘subjects’. There was ‘no Discurse started here of Indns. but they may be dealt with as we please’, the agent com­plained. ‘We are so intoxicated with providential Success that we will presently stumple over the whole Universe, if no Block should happen to lay in our way’.⁶

But the British were about to be blocked.

On the surface, though, the Anglo-Indian War seems but a prologue to a new history of European imperialism. American historians point to the Seven Years’ War and the Anglo- Indian War as the start of more violent and racist relations between Europeans and Native Americans. The success of the attacks sapped the willingness of more and more Europeans to distinguish between ‘good’ or allied Indians, and enemy Indians. Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander at the time, summed up the new attitude when he acquiesced in attempts to deploy smallpox-infested blankets among Indians in the hopes of spreading devastation indiscriminately. Amherst also ordered the execution of any captured Indian, and declared his wish to see ‘there was not an Indian Settlement within a Thousand Miles of our Country; for they are only fit to live with the Inhabitants of the Woods, being more nearly allied with the Brute than the Human Creation’.⁸ In a larger sense, too, Amherst’s attitude represented the origin of a shift in thinking among British imperialists at precisely the moment when they were beginning to encounter a new set of indigenous peoples in the Pacific.

Yet Amherst’s bloody-mindedness, as well as subsequently imposed historical frame­works, mask a more fluid truth. Despite threats to ‘extirpate that Vermine from a Country they have forfeited, and with it all Claim to the Rights of Humanity’, the British were never able to retaliate, nor did they bring anyone to justice for the attacks.⁹ Moreover, despite a determination not to rest until the offenders were properly chastised, the British had to negotiate a settlement to hostilities that included thousands of pounds worth of presents and gifts, and a re-opening of the trade with Indians on virtually the same terms that the Indians had negotiated with the French long before the arrival of the British. Finally, even before Amherst was sent packing in disgrace from North America for mis­handling the war, policy-makers in Whitehall realised that the only way to put an end to a ceaseless conflict with indigenous peoples was to draw a clear line between British settlers and native nations. The Proclamation Line of 1763—the line that became a sharp thorn in the sides of irate colonists including George Washington—forbade settlement of Indian lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Though squatters ignored the line and continued to pour over the hills, speculators such as Washington who wanted formal title to lands they thought they had purchased could not. Native Americans had forced the British to recognise their claims, and in doing so helped precipitate the American War for Independence.¹⁰

The failure of the British to prosecute the Anglo-Indian War was in part a result of the multiplying points of contact with indigenous peoples they faced in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War.

What the British glimpsed was just the tip of the iceberg of a dense set of relations that stretched back well beyond the points of prominent contact. These relations and the rich histories they had created and were in the process of creating still confound histor­ians as much as they did Europeans at the time. At Michilimackinac, for example, numerous Anishinaabeg doodemag (or kinship groups) clustered together and appeared to form unitary villages of Ottawa and Ojibwe peoples. But doodemag at Michilimackinac were equally connected to kin and family who lived in villages widely dispersed across the northern Great Lakes. They, in turn, could count on support, alliance and refuge from hundreds of families and villages placed still further in the continental interior. While these connections often only manifested themselves in the form of relations with Europeans, those who lived beyond the reach of the British also had to negotiate relations with each other, other Indian nations and other Europeans. These relations sometimes helped precipitate resistance to Europeans, and were mobilised in favour of Europeans. But they often also showed an indifference to Europeans and European politics that mystified the newcomers. These networks of indigenous social and political relations beyond the realm of Europeans remain incompletely understood, but there is no doubt that empires and imperial officials were affected by the politics of indigenous worlds whether they were aware of it or not.

One example of such interaction resulted from the reintroduction of the horse on the western plains of North America in the early sixteenth century, which transformed numerous indigenous cultures over the subsequent centuries. While scholars have more recently questioned the uniform benefits of this transformation, one clear result was that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Lakota Sioux had successfully embraced horse­based cultural changes and began expanding westward from the Great Lakes out on to the Great Plains. Eventually, as Richard White has suggested, this expansion would result in a conflict of two expanding imperial cultures in the nineteenth century, the Sioux and the United States.¹¹ But early Sioux expansion had other less noticeable effects. Certainly their movements westward took pressure off their former neighbours in the Lakes. This meant the Anishinaabeg and other Algonquians of the pays d'en haut could similarly expand westward as they came under pressure from Europeans on their own eastern flanks. And so they did, with new settlements sprawling out across the lakes and rivers from Green Bay to the Mississippi.

Such expansion became crucial when the French were formally knocked out of the imperial equation after 1763 and Spain subsequently acquired French claims west of the Mississippi. Algonquians in the Great Lakes now had access to another European power, and did not hesitate to use the threat this entailed to the British to great effect. The incoming British commander at Michilimackinac, Robert Rogers, got a taste of the new politics as soon as he arrived at his post in 1766. The Anishinaabe Ottawa summoned him to a council at their lakeside village of Waganakising, or, as the French called it, L’Arbre Croche. The Ottawa acknowledged their fidelity to the British, but put Rogers on notice that there were plenty of ‘bad birds flying from the West side of the Missisipi to this part of the World’. They also warned Rogers that there were many rumours that the French were assembling a force to come up through the largely Spanish-held Mississippi, through the Great Lakes, and down to Niagara till they met another army landing in New York. Showing an awareness of the growing imperial crisis on the eastern seaboard, the Ottawa noted the French could do this ‘with great ease’ because the ‘English people are divided in America, & more than one half of them will join the French’. Rogers was subsequently embroiled in a major controversy over his command that stemmed from his over-generosity with gifts to placate his new neighbours.¹²

Indigenous peoples in North America continued to manipulate their relations with European powers, even—and sometimes especially—throughout a period of revolution. During the long colonial period, they had little interest in seeing either the British or the French defeated entirely, for, as they often said, ‘the White people were for reducing them to nothing, that the views of both Nations tended to one and the same object’. Instead, as the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies, William Johnson, later observed, ‘they were desirous to preserve a kind of equilibirum between us, and inclined occasionally to throw their weight into the lightest scale’. When the French occu­pied the posts, the Indians flirted with the British and used threats of going over to them to pursue their interests. Now that the British occupied the posts, they were only too happy to do the same. Native Americans played off the British against the newly conquered French in their midst, the Spanish on their western borders and British colonists. Some were heartier for one side or another, but most wanted to maintain the balance of power. Then, when conflict broke out between the British and some of their colonists in 1775, Native Americans employed the same strategy. Even after the American War for Independence, many Native Americans continued to play off the new Republic and the British Empire on their northern borders. Most historians today agree that one result of this was the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States—a war the British hardly needed in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, but which was largely brought about by savvy Indian politics.

This was little different from what Europeans did, Johnson concluded. Trying to maintain the balance of power, he said, was a way of thinking ‘so exactly correspondent with that of the most Civilized Nations’.¹³

Of course, violent resistance and careful manipulation were not the only responses indigenous Americans employed against Europeans at the end of the colonial era in the Atlantic world. As they had done for a century or more, native peoples continued to adapt, accommodate and often cooperate with the newcomers. When we stop to look more clo­sely at the kinds of ‘settlements’ Indians made with Europeans we see many continuities: Native Americans continued to create alliances through marriage, for example, and often laboured, prayed, explored, journeyed and fought with Europeans as they criss-crossed the continent in greater numbers, and began to turn their attention to the Pacific. If we look hard enough, we will also no doubt find connections between indigenous peoples in far- flung places, too, especially along the water’s edge. For example, hundreds of Native Americans joined the British army and navy, or served alongside crews of merchant ships plying legal and illegal waters. There are tantalising stories about such work. One involved Scottish traders in the Hudson Bay Company organising a punitive expedition against local Indians up the Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island in present-day British Columbia in 1828. To achieve it, they had to rely on a motley crew of Iroquois, Chinook slaves, Hawaiians, French and Metis from all over the continent. Hundreds if not thousands of Native Americans also mixed with indigenous Hawaiian sailors on board whaling ships and travelled the world in numbers beginning in the late eighteenth century.¹⁴ What stories did they tell each other? What new strategies did they forge together? Imperialism was no doubt a destructive force in the lives of many indigenous communities, but it also created opportunities for exchange, communication, the creation of ever-wider networks of rela­tions, and resistance. Our histories of European imperial expansion need to be more attuned to these maritime connections.