People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey Thomas M. Wickman People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America. By Robert Michael Morrissey. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022. 294 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. On the vast and flat stage of the eastern tallgrass prairies, "people and bison herds made each other" (59), as Robert Michael Morrissey's book, People of the Ecotone, argues. The ecotone in the book's title refers to a shifting ecological transition zone of continental importance, in this case the easternmost places where a protruding thumb of tallgrass prairies pushed outward against woodlands on three sides. Centering the Illinois nation among Native communities converging at the midcontinent, People of the Ecotone presents a more-than-human history of a contested region at a time of climate change. Morrissey's excellent book traces the deep history of the ecotone and asks profoundly interdisciplinary questions about the contingencies, choices, and interactions that shaped Indigenous worlds of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Interpreting the French colonial archive and synthesizing insights from the fields of geology, paleobotany, paleoclimatology, archaeology, ecology, and geography, Morrissey presents grounded and specific histories of Indigenous readaptation and realignment. Few scholars have addressed environmental history and Native American history so well in a single work. A number of moments in deep time sets the stage: sixty-six million years ago when the eventual Rocky Mountain range emerged—casting a rain shadow and creating a moisture gradient of relative rainfall from driest to less dry, moving from the western plains to the area where the tallgrass prairies pointed east; the evolution, by around twenty-three million years ago, of the C4 carbon pathway in plants, which refers specifically to an ability to create biomass from four carbon acids and broadly to emerging traits adapted to arid conditions and grazing animals, which later became important as resulting grasses outcompeted less drought-tolerant species across new temperate grasslands; the divergence of early bison from cow-like ancestors about one million years ago; and the speciation of Bison bison, with a tendency to take flight over fight, between five and ten thousand years ago, a genetic change likely shaped by human hunting. For a time, by around 750 C.E., some peoples of the Midwest forged new ways of life around maize and other plants, but in response to intense droughts of the twelfth century, most had dispersed and readjusted to life without agriculture. Simultaneously, pushed by drought, bison from the plains expanded their range eastward, becoming "perhaps the first large herds of bison grazing [End Page 780] in these far eastern prairies during the whole Holocene Epoch" (12). Into these new conditions, people from the east, including ancestors of the Illinois, arrived from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and found opportunity, increasingly devoting themselves to bison hunts and, crucially, shaping the landscape through fire. If not for the continued efforts of these newly bison-centered nations to shape their own history, climate might have pushed back the prairie and the bison sooner than it did. When the colder climate of the Little Ice Age intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reforestation might have taken back lands claimed by grass during drier and warmer periods, but instead evidence suggests that anthropogenic fires at these ecological edges kept the tallgrass biome intact and thus preserved the eastern bison herds where they were, at least for a time. In contrast to the climatic determinism that easily seeps into even some of the best climate histories, Morrissey's book describes Indigenous "opportunities" (12), not necessities, and demonstrates the ways that Illinois people and other Indigenous historical agents took advantage of the "new abundance of the ecotone in the Little Ice Age" (89).1 Over multiple generations, and certainly by the late seventeenth century, the Illinois nation and other competing Indigenous peoples of this ecotone region became bison people: running in coordinated pursuit of the herds, carrying skins and ribs long distances to large settlements, processing the hides at great scale and speed, distributing trade...