Indigenous power in a significant cultural and ecological borderland
Robert Michael Morrissey is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois. He is author of Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country.
"This book should alert environmental historians and historians of
borderlands and Native American history to new ways of thinking
about cross-cultural interactions in the entangled environments of
North America and beyond. As historians continue to integrate works
of environmental history with interpretations of cross-cultural
dynamics in early America and beyond, Morrissey’s work should serve
as a lodestar to future methods and understandings."
*American Historical Review*
"People of the Ecotone will interest a wide audience of readers
across historically oriented fields of Native American studies, as
well as critical scholars of Native and Indigenous studies
concerned with issues of representation and historical memory.
Morrissey's critical approach to the ecotone as unit for
geographical analysis will also serve as mode of departure for
others who wish to interrogate the spatial logics of colonialism
and their possible alternatives."
*Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal*
"It is impossible to do justice to Morrissey's subtle and
complicated arguments in a brief review. This book is dense but
elegantly written, a masterful argument for why historians need to
look at place first, understanding how environment shapes human
relations in order to appreciate the logic of Native adaptations
and cultural constructs, even dark ones. It is this complex
interplay between environment and culture that illuminates very
human choices and indigenous agency, even when the violence of
settler colonialism seems an easier answer."
*Pacific Historical Review*
"People of the Ecotone is a captivating analysis of the ways in
which the peculiar environmental characteristics of the Illinois
River Valley and the larger prairie peninsula redefined Native
American societies after the fall of Cahokia . . . I highly
recommend this book for those interested in the complexities of
Midwestern colonial and Native American histories."
*Western Historical Quarterly*
"Morrissey reveals the intersection of ecological forces that
shaped an icredible, dynamic interplay of people and tall grass
prairie and forest ecosystems in the Indigenous borderlands of the
Midwest. Morrissey focuses his well-crafted narrative on the
ecological relationships that shaped the lives of the Illini,
Miami, Meskwaki peoples."
*Western History Association Hal K. Rothman Book Prize
committee*
"Morrissey’s excellent book traces the deep history of the ecotone
and asks profoundly interdisciplinary questions about the
contingencies, choices, and interactions that shaped Indigenous
worlds of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries."
*William and Mary Quarterly*
"A compelling book...People of the Ecotone shines as an example of
how focusing on “the place where they lived” enables new histories
about Indigenous peoples before, during, and after colonial
encounters. It is a must read for historians of the colonial
Mississippi valley and definitely a should read for other
environmental historians, early Americanists, and Indigenous
studies scholars."
*H-Environment*
"Morrissey clearly conveys the benefits that a new materialist
perspective can give to his audience. Perhaps Morrissey's book will
encourage further collaboration between theoretical philosophy and
history. With this refreshing environment-history-philosophy hybrid
approach, readers can reflect on how much autonomy human
communities have had, or have not had, throughout history when
actors like bison, climate, plants, and other non-human entities
were in play."
*World History Encyclopedia*
"Morrissey's recontextualization succeeds at placing Euro-American
historical perspectives within an Indigenous frame, while the
ecotone operates to thwart histories of the Fox Wars that
decontextualize the political economy born from this mid-continent
ecotone."
*Environmental History*
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