Hedged Bets and Serious Games: Native Responses to Settler Colonialism and Indian Removal in the 19th-Century Middle West

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Until their settlement was burned by the Illinois militia in 1832, Native people—mostly Ho-Chunks—made their homes in a village along the Rock River in Northern Illinois. This settlement’s inhabitants were well aware of the threats posed by settler colonial encroachment and the intensification of removal policies. These and other Ho-Chunks living on the Rock approached these threats in many—often seemingly “contradictory” —ways. Residents served as guides for white settlers, developed close trade, kin and friendship relations with regional traders, while at the same time periodically engaging in violence against these same people and striving to remain geographically remote, though not isolated, from white settler “metropoles.” In this paper, I analyze the assemblage from this site in conjunction with another from a contemporaneous Rock River site collected by Janet Spector in the 1970s, utilizing Ortner’s concept of “serious games” to try to better understand and contextualize these responses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 663