An Infinity of Nations
How the Native New World Shaped Early North America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5703100 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Warren, Stephen M Warren (0000-0002-2137-4461, Augustana College, corresponding author), S Warren |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1210-1211 |
| Publication date | 2013-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jas617 |
| OpenAlex | W1964757669 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
Michael Witgen's An Infinity of Nations challenges readers to reconsider much of what we think we know about early American and American Indian history. The author focuses on the Anishinaabe and their relations with the Cree and Dakota peoples from the upper Mississippi River valley to Hudson Bay as they moved between French, English, and American colonizers. These peoples identified themselves as members of kin groups and alliance systems that resulted in a series of “multipolar social formations” (p. 19). Anishinaabe “social formations” remained autonomous, even independent of colonizers, well into the nineteenth century. Individual bands formed alliances often at odds with alliances made by their relatives. Native peoples of the interior were remarkably cosmopolitan, but their divided loyalties frustrated colonizers who hoped to strike deals with leaders of coherent native nations. Witgen emphasizes that the Anishinaabe and their neighbors were nothing like nation-states. Indeed, their alliance systems, constant movement, and shifting subsistence cycles enabled them to remain independent of the United States at a later date than most historians allow. Like the shape-shifting other-than-human persons described in Anishinaabe oral traditions, native peoples moved expertly between alliance systems and kin groups and constantly adapted to new circumstances. This versatility enabled them to dominate a vast trading system that neither Europeans nor Americans could control
Alliance · Archaeology · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Nothing · Odds · Political science · Politics · Subsistence agriculture · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecology · History · Law · Medicine
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| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |