The Shawnees And Their Neighbors Summary

The Shawnees and Their Neighbors in Review The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 by Stephen Warren looks into the lives of Native Americans in the Old Northwest. This time was characterized by warfare and failed compromises between the Americans and Native Americans. Native Americans faced failure and removal much in part due to their inability to combine forces to fight against, or seek to gain rights from the American frontiersmen. Stephen Warren is speaking at the Wiping Away the Tears: The Battle of Tippecanoe in History and Memory, which is a symposium that marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Tippecanoe. Warren received his Ph.D at Indiana University and now is a professor at Augustana College, a small liberal arts school which has a strong history program that resides in Illinois right by the Mississippi
The Shawnee were spread across multiple states and therefore had a rich, diverse culture. Taking this whole group of people and placing them in one condensed reservation is naturally going to cause some discourse within the group. Complications only increased with the introduction of Christian Missionaries into the Indiana Reservation. They tried to divide people up in relation to their religious affiliation, which changes the traditional Shawnee social organization (Warren 99). Many Native American leaders began holding religious services twice a week, which helped them gain power within the reservation and with the missionaries and other Americans outside the reservation (Warren 101). Taking highly respected religious positions also became a way to gain power and respect, and religion began to function the dominant power on the reservation. The Shawnee Methodists proved to be the strongest faction among religious groups, and it was their ideology that controlled the reservation (Warren