Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. By Colin G. Galloway. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.xvi, 301).

By The Erudite Redneck

Niagara and Stockbridge are fairly familiar, but even students of history might overlook Odanak, Oquaga, Maquachake, Chota, Tchoukafala and Cuscowilla as important venues of the American Revolution. Colin G. Galloway sifts their stories from papers, letters and journals of revolutionary leaders who, he asserts, dealt with tribes rather than “communities.” Galloway, a British citizen, rescues eight complex multiethnic communities from historians of the Revolution uninterested in Indians and Indian historians uninterested in the Revolution.

Galloway sets up his examination by painting 1775 America as a whirl of ethnicity and commerce, vibrant cultural exchange, personal and social adaptation as well as conflict. Before focusing his admittedly non-Indian, non-American probe on the individual communities, Galloway, professor of history and native American studies at Dartmouth College, addresses the Revolution in Indian country in general. From Quebec to Florida to the Mississippi, native peoples reacted and interacted with diplomatic and political complexity to what seemed so black-and-white, after war erupted, to American revolutionaries and the British.

Galloway admits that The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities is a collage, not a survey. He tells eight separate war stories.

The already ambivalent Abenakis in Odanak, in Quebec, were strategically positioned on the frontier, which exacerbated tensions; the community strained internally but survived. In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, laid out as a “praying town,” the Mahicans and others sided with patriots; their diplomacy could not preserve them amid an exploding American population. In Oquaga, in New York’s Iroquois country, a political-cultural crossroads for the Six Nations, factionalism predating the Revolution collapsed the community before it was burned and scattered. The refugee community surrounding Fort Niagara in New York swelled into a conglomeration of Mohawks and others struggling against corrupt trade and internecine conflict worsened by war.

The Maquachakes in the Ohio Valley strove for neutrality yet this division of the Shawnees saw tribal splintering and villages burned on the front line. At Chota, in now eastern Tennessee, the capital of the northern Cherokees saw a chance to win back lands lost to fraudulent dealing; their efforts led to defeat and an American sense that taking Cherokee land was patriotic. In the Tchoukafala community in the lower Mississippi Valley, Chickasaws maintained independence as the British-Spanish-American-tribal struggle upended their world, yet diplomatic skill served them until well after the Revolution. The Cuscowilla community of Seminoles in Florida saw the Revolution transform their estrangement from Creeks to the north, their kin, from one of geography and culture to politics.

Galloway’s work is a patchwork by his own admission. As such, the main commonality among his eight separate tales is that the main players in each were Indians. The broad, almost majestic sweep of his beginning and ending chapters is almost lost in the middle details. However, his work helps bridge the chasm he detected in histories of the Revolution, a fresh beginning for Americans, a gloomy one for most natives.

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