The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Early American Studies)

Winner of the 2007 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association. In "The Native Ground", Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity as well as our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were at times more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them. With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.