People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey (review)

Reviewed by: People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey Michael D. Wise (bio) People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey University of Washington Press, 2022 OVER THE LAST SEVERAL DECADES the conventional grand narratives of early American historiography have been lurching—if unevenly—toward the acceptance of two profound realities: first, the widespread presence of nontextual archives suggesting the myriad ways Native people shaped political and social transformations both before and after colonial contact; and, second, the legacy of the field of American history itself as an instrument of settler colonialism that, for generations, has probably obscured as much about Native history as it has revealed. Robert Michael Morrissey's People of the Ecotone further compels early Americanists to continue this critical Native studies turn by pursuing the field's colonial narratives onto the edge of the tallgrass prairies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, looking to the ecological specificities of these complex patchworks of grass and trees as a source for reframing the region's Native histories and geographies. Morrissey's geographic focus rests primarily on a vision of seventeenth-century Illinois as a "prairie peninsula" jutting eastward across the Mississippi River (as the ecologist Edgar Transeau put it) and rightfully emphasizes the challenge of imagining this historical landscape in the wake of its modern transformation into homogenized fields of corn and soybeans. For centuries, however, the region represented a dynamic boundary zone between the grasslands to the west and the woodlands to the east, a setting of ecological complexity where Illinois, Meskwaki, and other Native communities thrived on livelihoods that included diverse forms of hunting and agricultural production. Put in the language of another twentieth-century ecolo-gist, Frederic Clements, the Illinois country was an "ecotone," a site where two or more biotic communities shaded into one another. Morrissey uses "a shoreline of grass" as his metaphor for describing this easternmost finger of the tallgrass, which would have been a mosaic of prairies interspersed with forests of oak and hickory (20–23). An extended explication of this historical geography and its changing climate unfolds over several chapters in which Morrissey also traces the eastward migration of bison to the region following the droughts that may have led to the dispersal of Cahokia End Page 128 by the twelfth century. These efforts to reorient the reader's geographical perspective represent a major contribution of the book by insisting that early American historians approach place not simply as a setting on which history "plays out" but as a historical subject requiring its own multidisciplinary analysis. The latter half of People of the Ecotone develops a more conventional historical narrative bookended by the Iroquois raids of 1680 and the conclusion of the Fox Wars in the 1730s. Morrissey convincingly reframes this violence as a contingent outcome of the Illinois's and Meskwaki's circumstances within their ecotonal transition zone, a discussion that adds complexity to the typical textbook explanation of the "Beaver Wars" as a rippling displacement of colonial conflict westward. This analysis will undoubtedly interest many early American specialists, but in the context of the book's larger innovations these final interventions seemed somewhat vestigial. In that sense, People of the Ecotone itself exists in a kind of a transition zone between its broad multidisciplinary approach and its disciplinary textual fetish, which I mean not as admonition but as admiration. The book is at its best when it takes analytical risks. In particular, Morrissey's deep dive into the potential significance of running as a sensory activity vital to Native identities in the tallgrass prairies is brilliant, unexpected, and makes use of a variety of nontextual sources to develop its force and meaning. Morrissey offers us an example of what historians can contribute to interdisciplinary discussions in Native studies when they foreground sensitivities to perception, embodiment, and haptic knowledge as serious subjects of study, and when they eschew the Cartesian assumptions and cartographic rigidities that have long confined the discipline. For all these reasons People of the Ecotone will interest a wide audience of readers across historically oriented...