Exiles and Pioneers - (Studies in North American Indian History) by John P Bowes

About the Book

Exiles and Pioneers focuses on the experiences of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Indians from the late 1700s to the 1860s.

Book Synopsis

Exiles and Pioneers analyzes the removal and post-removal histories of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and Potawatomi Indians. The book argues that the experience of these eastern Indians from the late 1700s to the 1860s was at its core a struggle over geographic and political place within the expanding United States. Even as American expansion limited the geographic scope of Indian lands, the extension of American territories and authority raised important questions about the political status of these Indians as individuals as well as nations within the growing republic. More specifically, the national narrative and even the prominent images of Indian removal cast the eastern Indians as exiles who were constantly pushed beyond the edges of American settlement. This study proposes that ineffective federal policies and ongoing debates within Indian communities also cast some of these eastern Indians as pioneers, unwilling trailblazers in the development of the United States.

Review Quotes

"...a refreshingly complex picture of removal, a subject too often reduced to a simple story of Indian victimization at the hands of federal officals." -Andrew Denson, Journal of American Ethnic History

"...readers interested in the settlement of the American Midwest in the nineteeth century by both Euro-American and American Indian migrants will learn a great deal from Exiles and Pioneers."

"Recommended." -Choice

Exiles and Pioneers is a long overdue treatment of the ninteenth-century transition of the Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, and Potawatomis as they faced removal from their homelands in the Midwest and resettled in their new homelands in Kansas." -Robbie Ethridge, Western Historical Quarterly