Native Americans: history, culture, and contemporary issues

Shawnee

A Counterpoint to the Traditional Telling of the Shawnee People

The story of the Native American experience during the era of American expansion is one commonly told and rife with demonstrations of tragedy, atrocity and genocide. A whitewashing of the native populations which once dominated the land would be conducted both combatively and culturally, with the first centuries of encounter between colonists and natives marked by deception, exploitation and violence. But it was not until the century following America's war for independence that the focus turned almost entirely toward the extermination of these cultures. So is this the centerpiece to the text by Edmunds (1985), which concerns the Shawnee tribes in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio and westward. A tribe most noted for its prominent leader, Tecumseh, it is actually his brother, Tenskwatawa, who is used to drive the story of his people here.

Where Tecumseh is embraced in white histories on the subject for his agreeable political orientation and his tendencies toward conciliatory tactics, Tenskwatawa is larger relegated to consideration for his less talents and his religious extremism. But in the dynamic between the two figures, Edmunds suggests, we may observe the full spectrum of native contradictions. Just as Tecumseh reflected the precarious desire to achieve peace with the white settlers, Tenskwatawa represented the bitter resentment and the desire to gain vengeance for the various abuses suffered by the Shawnee. Edmunds makes the case in his text that this dynamic is the best way to understand the final years where the Shawnee struggled to survive. Here within, Edmunds tells, "both Indians and white Americans were the products of their own cultures and had difficulty in comprehending each others' perspective. This problem was not unique to the nineteenth-century American frontier, for it has continued to plague humanity for centuries." (Edmunds, x)

And in Tenskwatawa, the rage and futility which marked the native experience would come into greater focus as he channeled his values into opposing the extension of white cultural priorities and Christian teachings. Here, the figure in question starts to come into greater focus in spite of the critique which is levied against his personality. It is clear that amongst his peers, Tenskwatawa understood the devastating implications of cultural assimilation for the natives. Indeed, a greater understanding of Edmunds' decision to focus on Tenskwatawa is facilitated by the fact that this particular figure predicted the death of the Shawnee as a function not just of white wars but of its churches, missions and schools.

This is one of the prominent strengths of the text, which approaches a history told a great many times -- to the extent that its details and perspective have largely become mythologized -- with a fresh set of eyes. Indeed, the most compelling aspect of the work is its centering of attention on a figure and a narrative which have together manifested as an afterthought to the traditionally told legends of the Shawnee people. Notably, Edmunds gives prelude to his own text by acknowledging that before initiating the research conducted on this subject, his understanding of the Shawnee had centered almost entirely on the iconic Tecumseh.

Atkinson (2007), in a review of the Edmunds text, reinforces this distinction, noting that where so many Shawnee texts have used Tecumseh's ambition of uniting the Western tribes of North America and his death during the Battles of Thames as ways of framing the narrative of the people in question, the Edmunds text offers a pointedly supplementary text to these approaches. Accordingly, in Edmunds' text, "Tecumseh's death is covered in a single paragraph. And instead of the Battle of the Thames being the denouement of the book, as is the case in most other accounts of the Shawnee, it was just an event that lead to the real ending of the Shawnee people as a power and protector of the midwest; their removal to the Shawnee reservation in Kansas." (Atkinson, 1)

This is an important divergence of approaches, not simply because it dispenses with the ordinary telling of this story but also because it recasts the way we might understand the death of the Shawnee tribes. Where the caricature of the heroic and generally lionized Tecumseh is concerned, there is a tendency to vest too much stock in the role played by a single charismatic leader in defining the suffering and ambition of the Shawnee people. Edmunds' work is an accomplishment particularly for undoing the myth that a single people can be defined thusly. By shifting his focus to Tecumseh's counterpoint, a religiously inclined brother who prioritized conflict over unity, and especially by framing the conclusion of this story according to the placement of the Shawnee on a reservation, Edmunds succeeds in demonstrating the scale of this atrocity in a way that histories centering on a single man cannot.

Instead of making the narrative suggestion that the death of a hero in battle caused the end of the Shawnee people, Edmunds makes it clear that this was in fact a systematic dismantling of a culture millennia in the making which was culminated by the displacement of those who might have otherwise carried on a Shawnee legacy. This helps to promote a more realistic understanding of the cultural imposition and practical impediments to native survival.

If the text may be said to have any weakness, it is perhaps the underwhelming focus on Tecumseh. Though the emphasis on his brother is a welcome point of divergence and is also justified by the purpose of the text, this same purpose might have been more effectively served by a comparative analysis of the two. Many readers will have entered into this text with a familiar grounding in Tecumseh's accomplishments. These readers would benefit from a comprehensive separating of myth and fact, particularly as these may be illuminating in the story of Tenskwatawa. With respect to the relative lack of probing consideration of Tecumseh, we lose the opportunity to understand Tenskwatawa as a counterpoint.