He then looks at the experience of refugee Delawares, who settled among the Ojibwa as a missionary-sponsored community yet managed to maintain an identity distinct from missionary influences. He first examines patterns of traditional lifeway continuity among the Ojibwa, demonstrating their ability to maintain seasonal mobility up to the mid-nineteenth century and their adaptive response to its loss. In reconsidering Native adaptation and resistance to colonial British rule, Ferris reviews five centuries of interaction that are usually read as a single event viewed through the lens of historical bias. He examines how communities from three aboriginal nations in what is now southwestern Ontario negotiated the changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and maintained a cultural continuity with their pasts that has been too often overlooked in conventional “master narrative” histories of contact.

In this book, Neal Ferris offers alternative explanations of colonial encounters that emphasize continuity as well as change affecting Native behaviors.

Library of Congress E99.C6F48 2009 | Dewey Decimal 971.3222Ĭolonialism may have significantly changed the history of North America, but its impact on Native Americans has been greatly misunderstood. The Archaeology of Native-Lived Colonialism: Challenging History in the Great Lakes Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire. With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, the book helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. From its first scene in a benighted Great Lakes river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes, alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, Indigenous peoples and federal agencies. 2022 NAUTILUS SILVER WINNER FOR LYRIC PROSE-In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world that, despite a ferocious industrial history, remains wondrous and worthy of care.

Great Lakes Nature by Mary Blocksma