"The Indiana Way" on Native Peoples

The first three sections of  The Indiana Way: a state history by James H. Madison explore Indiana before it was a state, dealing with Native Americans before the white settlers arrived and their relations with them after they arrived. The first chapter explored the native people before Europe had settled North America. Some of the tribes in the Indiana area were the Potawatomis and the Miamis. Madison notes that there is not a lot of archaeological evidence about the Paleo-Indian people (up to 8000 B.C.), but that there definitely were people in the area. The four prehistoric traditions each increase with more information about the prehistoric peoples and the last one, titled the Mississippian Tradition (A.D. 900-1600) has the most information due to recency (5). 

A few years prior to the American Revolution was The French and Indian War fought between the British and French colonists in America. The Native American people played a big part in the war through trading and economic agreements. The French had a more consistent relationship with the Potawatomis and the Miamis through the fur trade, but it was not necessarily nonviolent. The British did not have as great an opportunity to form a relationship with the Indians because of their victory in the French and Indian War.

Madison acknowledges that his history is not a reference book and that he has tried to include both the glorified and nonglorified parts of Indiana's history (xiv). This non-glorification comes out strongly when Madison writes about the relationship between the white people and the Native Americans during the end of the 18th century. Since "Indians did not fully understand or share American concepts of land ownership and transfer of title to land," Harrison was able to exploit and take advantage of them in order to take their land (38). He used the conflict in between tribes and within tribes to coalesce them into change. Along with that, missionaries and federal agents tried to 'civilize' and 'assimilate' the Indians that they encountered with harsh treatment. As a result, there were strong anti-anglo feelings in the Native American nations and those feelings translated into war acts. William Wells was a Indian-American translator who was born in Kentucky but was kidnapped by Indians at a young age. When given the chance to return to his Kentucky family, he refused and stayed with the Indian tribe as a part of their community and militia. Later in life, he translated between the government and the Indian nation, but was not fully trusted on either side.

In the Indiana area, slavery was a controversial issue. Prominent people had held slaves for years, and in the early 1800's, Governor George Harrison pushed for the legalization of slavery in the Indiana area. In 1805, a bill was passed that legalized indentured servitude, but not slavery. The loophole through this was that the indentured servants would have sentences longer than their lifespan, making them slaves (49). The Quakers in southeastern Indiana were against slavery. When Indiana became a state in 1816, slavery was abolished except for already existing servants/slaves, and then that policy was overruled in the early 1820's.

My reaction the The Indiana Way is that it is quite a bit of information crammed into one book, but that's to be expected in a state history. State history books tend to glorify the state's past, usually because they are written by people from that state, or because the authors care about the state. I'm happy to see that Madison addresses his own bias in the introduction and writes in a way (so far) that is not overly romantic nor overly critical.