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Although often attributed to the Odawa ogima, or headman, Pontiac, the conflict that bears his name was the work of a large and complicated network of Native people in the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, and Mississippi Valley. Together Native Americans from this wide swath of North America identified their collective dissatisfaction of British Indian policy and, through careful negotiation and discussion, formulated a religious and political ideology that advocated for the Britons’ removal. In 1763, these diverse peoples carried off a successful military campaign that demonstrated Native sovereignty and power in these areas. Although falling short of its original goal of displacing the British, the coalition compelled the British Empire to change its policies and to show, outwardly at least, respect for Native peoples. Many of the peoples involved in the struggle would wage another such pan-Indian campaign against the United States a generation later.

In many ways, the anti-British campaign of 1761–1766 mirrored another anti-imperial campaign that followed a decade later. Like the American Revolution, the anti-British advocates of Pontiac’s War developed an ideology that specifically critiqued not only British policy but often questioned imperialism altogether, built an unstable and delicate coalition of diverse and sometimes antagonistic peoples, and sought to assert the participants’ independence from the British. However, the participants in Pontiac’s War were sovereign and autonomous indigenous nations, only recently and nominally allied to the British Empire, not British colonists, as in the American Revolution. Together these anti-British activists mounted a serious challenge to the British presence in the trans-Appalachian West and forced the British Empire to accede to many of their demands.

King Philip’s War (1675–1678) was both a colonial war and an Indigenous resistance movement, which erupted in the summer of 1675 in Wampanoag country and in Plymouth Colony, but quickly spread throughout coastal and interior Native homelands and New England. While sometimes regarded as a singular moment of conquest in the birth of New England, it also was known as the “first Indian war.” Thus, conflicts over land and jurisdiction among New England colonists and Native nations continued not only until the end of King Philip’s War in 1678 but through nearly one hundred years of warfare and diplomacy, in which Native people in the Northeast sought to adapt to colonization and draw settlers into Indigenous protocols and networks.

The story of the pre-Columbian Mississippi Period (1000 ce–1600 ce) of the American South and parts of the Midwest is the story of the rise of the ancient Mississippian towns and cities and the world they made, the history of that world, and its collapse with European contact. First, however, readers must become acquainted with the chiefdom concept as it applies to these ancient towns and cities in order to outline some of the basic organizing structures of Mississippian political units. The Mississippi Period began with the rise of the great Indian city of Cahokia and the long reach of its influence over a vast region, resulting in a new social, religious, and political ordering across the land and the formation of numerous polities that archaeologists call “chiefdoms” (the Early Mississippi Period 1000 ce–1300 ce). The fall of Cahokia around 1300 ce cleared the way for the elaboration of these early chiefdoms and the rise of others throughout the Mississippian world (the Middle Mississippi Period 1300–1475 ce). Many of these grand Middle Mississippi chiefdoms, in turn, collapsed around 1450 ce. In the wake of this collapse, people regrouped and built new chiefdoms throughout the American South (the Late Mississippi Period 1475–1600 ce). These are the people that the early Spanish explorers met in the 16th century. Encounters with the Spaniards set in motion a series of colonial disruptions of warfare, disease, and commercial slave raiding that resulted in another collapse of the Mississippian world, only this time never to rise again. However, the survivors of these fallen chiefdoms regrouped and restructured their lives and societies for living in a new world order—this one being a colonial world on the margins of an expanding European empire.

From 1783 to 1830, American Indian policy reflected the new American nation-state’s desire to establish its own legitimacy and authority, by controlling Native American peoples and establishing orderly and prosperous white settlements in the continental interior. The Federalists focused on securing against Native American claims and attacks several protected enclaves of white settlement (Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee), established—often violently—during the Revolutionary War. They used treaties to draw a legal boundary between these enclaves and Indian communities, and annuities and military force to keep Indians on their side of the line. The Jeffersonian Republicans adopted a more expansive plan of development, coupled with the promotion of Native American dependency. Treaty commissioners persuaded chiefs to cede road easements and riverfront acreage that the government used to link and develop dispersed white settlements. Meanwhile, the War Department built trading factories whose cheap merchandise would lure Indians into commercial dependency, and agents offered Indian families agricultural equipment and training, hoping that Native American farmers would no longer need “extensive forests” to support themselves. These pressures helped engender nativist movements in the Old Northwest and southeast, and Indian men from both regions fought the United States in the War of 1812, reinforcing frontier settlers’ view that Indians were a security threat. After this war’s end, the United States adopted a strategy of containment, pressuring Indian leaders to cede most of their peoples’ lands, confining Indians to enclaves, financing vocational schooling for Indian children, and encouraging Native peoples voluntarily to move west of the Mississippi. This policy, however, proved too respectful of Indian autonomy for the frontier settlers and politicians steadily gaining influence in the national government. After these settlers elected one of their own, Andrew Jackson, to the presidency, American Indian policy would enter a much more coercive and violent phase, as white Americans redefined the nation-state as a domain of white supremacy ethnically cleansed of indigenous peoples.