Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West(Studies in North American Indian History)

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.

Table of Contents:
Part I. From the Great Lakes to the Prairie Plains: 1. Border and corrider: Shawnees, Delawares, and the Mississippi River; 2. Potawatomis, Delawares, and Indian removal in the Great Lakes; Part II. Becoming Border Indians: 3. Borderling subsistence and western adaptations; 4. Eastern council fires in the West; 5. Joseph Parks, William Walker, and the politics of change; Part III. From Kansas to exile: 6. Subtraction through division: Delawares, Wyandots, and the struggle for Kansas territory; 7. Power on the western front: Shawnee and Potawatomi Indians in Kansas; Epilogue: life after exile.

About the Author :
John P. Bowes is an Assistant Professor in Native American History at Eastern Kentucky University. Dr. Bowes received a B.A. in history from Yale University and completed both his M.A. and PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles. After receiving his doctorate and prior to starting at Eastern Kentucky University, he spent two years as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College.

Review :
"Recommended." -Choice "...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." "...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 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