Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792” (UNC Press, 2018)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Jul 26, 2018 · 48m

Historians have gotten the story of the colonial Ohio River Valley all wrong, argues Susan Sleeper-Smith in Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Omonundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Sleeper-Smith, a Professor of History at Michigan State University and soon-to-be Interim Director of the D’arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library, reads colonial sources against the grain and uses material culture to demonstrate how the Great Lakes region was a prosperous multicultural zone characterized by trade and…