“The Early Republic and Indian Country, 1812-1833” is a four-week school teacher institute for twenty-five participants on the interactions between Native Americans and European Americans in the early nineteenth century. From the end of the American Revolution to the 1830s, the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River was the site of interactions between white settlers and Native Americans and of conflicts over land, power, and governance that erupted during the War of 1812. The institute brings recent scholarship to bear on this period, supplemented by maps and documents from the excellent collections at the Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. The center’s director, Scott Stevens, and Frank Valadez of the Chicago Metro History Education Center direct the institute, with Ann Durkin Keating of North Central College as lead scholar. Participants first explore the reactions of Native groups to incursions by the French, British, and Americans from the late 1700s through 1810, and readings are drawn from Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country and Richard White’s The Middle Ground. They then consider ways that Indian groups incorporated Euro-American trade and culture into their societies, led by Susan Sleeper-Smith of Michigan State University. Readings for this second week include selections from Sleeper-Smith’s Indian Women and French Men, Theda Perdue’s “Native Women in the Early Republic,” and Richard White’s “The Fiction of Patriarchy: Indians and Whites in the Early Republic.” In the third week, participants focus on Native resistance and the War of 1812 with R. David Edmunds of the University of Texas at Dallas, reading excerpts from Edmunds’s Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership and Joel Martin’s Sacred Revolt. Finally, John Hall of the University of Wisconsin leads an examination of Indian removal after the War of 1812, with readings from Hall’s Uncommon Defense and Kerry Trask’s Black Hawk. Primary source materials include items such as an 1836 “Map of the Sites of Indian Tribes of North America,” letters of U.S. Indian agents, and the records of fur traders, which will bring the past to life. The group also visits the Field Museum, the Mitchell Museum, and the Chicago History Museum.
