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Crossing the River: Attitudes of Invasion in the Revolutionary Ohio Country
Zeltner, Oliver
Zeltner, Oliver
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Abstract
In recent decades, ethnohistorians have successfully shifted historical discussions of North American colonialism from a tale of White "pioneering" to one focused on Indigenous Peoples' experiences of, and responses to, imperial invasions. Too often, however, scholars have characterized the colonial impulse as a simple and singular phenomenon, one static across time and space. The case of the American invasion of the Ohio Country during the second half of the eighteenth century, however, demonstrates that the timing, nature, and pace of colonization depended upon two critical variables: perceptions and propaganda. Many Whites who entered Ohio as squatters, soldiers, speculators, or traders imported an irrational, nearly paranoid fear of the Ohio Indians, and Native Americans in general. At the same time, many Whites who ventured westward did so because they imagined the Ohio Country as an Eden that promised huge profits and easy living a vision of paradise that informed the popular imagination through rumor, exaggeration, and advertisements. These twin impulses worked in synergy to fuel a superheated atmosphere of extreme covetousness and virulent Indianhating in the Revolutionary Old Northwest which undermined attempts at crosscultural compromise and drew Shawnee, Delaware, Ottawa, Wyandot, Miami, Mingo, and other Native Ohioans into a homeland war of attrition against not only White invaders, but also a particularly pernicious strain of colonialism.
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2004-03-01
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Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program, University of Kansas: http://www.indigenous.ku.edu
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Citation
Indigenous Nations Journal, Volume 5, Number 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 51-72