There goes the neighbourhood: Joshua A McGonagle Althoff, ‘Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building’, Journal of American History, 110, 4, 2024, pp. 625-642 | settler colonial studies blog

There goes the neighbourhood: Joshua A McGonagle Althoff, ‘Managing Settlers, Managing Neighbors: Renarrating Johnson v. McIntosh through the History of Piankashaw Community Building’, Journal of American History, 110, 4, 2024, pp. 625-642

22Mar24

Abstract: On the evening of January 1, 1776, Peeyankihšiaki (Piankashaw people) gathered in the village of Vincennes (in present-day Indiana), several miles above the confluence of the Embarras River and Waapaahšiki Siipiiwi (Wabash River). They came to celebrate the coming of a new year with the Francophone residents of Vincennes. On behalf of the British at this fur-trading post, French commandant Jean Baptiste Racine dit St. Marie recorded the evening’s celebrations in his ledger of merchandise. St. Marie was most concerned with estimating the expense of gifts being distributed. Throughout the evening, he noted that eighty loaves of bread and twenty-five “carrots” of tobacco went to groups led by the akimaki (male civil leaders) Sakimia (Maringouin or Mosquito), Old Tobacco, and Young Tobacco. These akimaki were regular guests of St. Marie and leading families of Vincennes, and their company may have been a welcome reprieve to residents occupied with keeping warm. The evening’s quaintness belied the fact that these leaders had gathered not two months earlier to negotiate a deal with an afterlife that would become the foundation of contemporary American Indian law in the United States.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed