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Shawnee

The Shawnee are an Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe. The word Shawnee means “southerner,” identifying them as the southernmost tribe of Algonquian speakers. Shawnee have resided in an extensive region east of the Mississippi River that includes present-day Alabama, the Carolinas, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and the Virginias. Although the Shawnee are frequently described as a mobile, nomadic people, this stereotype emerges from a long history of contact with settler colonialism, which displaced and dispossessed them repeatedly for more than three centuries. In spite of this history, the Shawnee survived and maintain a strong sense of distinct tribal identity. Today, three federally recognized Shawnee tribes live in Oklahoma.

Pre-Contact and Culture

Many scholars argue that the Shawnee are one of the descendants of the Fort Ancient mound-building cultures, which abruptly disappeared around 1650, a period associated with the Beaver Wars. During this time, the Iroquois drove Shawnee and others living in present-day Ohio, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania out of the area. For 70 years following the conquest, the Ohio Valley remained virtually uninhabited. Forced to abandon their homelands, Shawnee scattered in various directions but never surrendered their identification with and claim to the area.

The Shawnee were a loose confederacy of five divisions sharing a common language and culture. Each division had a primary village and performed a specific function on behalf of the entire tribe. Shawnee maintained a patrilineal descent kinship structure and complementary gender roles. Men were hunters and warriors, and women were planters (growing in particular the “three sisters”: maize, beans, and squash). During the summer, the Shawnee gathered in large villages; in the fall, they separated into small hunting camps. Important ceremonies were tied to the agricultural cycle, two of which are still conducted: the bread dance and the green corn dance.

Colonial Contact

The early colonial period found the Shawnee in continual movement as various colonial powers fought for hegemony in the New World. The earliest historical records of the Shawnee occur in the 1670s in two widely distant locations: the Cumberland River and the Savannah River regions. By the early 1700s, the Shawnee began returning to their homelands in the Ohio Valley, but the transition was not a smooth one. The westward expansion of settler-colonists began to drive other Native peoples from the east into the area. Throughout the 18th century, refugee Native peoples in Ohio settled into pan-ethnic communities and grew into a large, powerful force central to trade in this area, claimed simultaneously by the Iroquois, French, and British. Numerous struggles for hegemony followed, and each military confrontation resulted in further land cessions for the Native peoples. During the French and Indian War (1754–63), encroachment upon Iroquois territory in the Hudson valley area set the stage for the treaty at Fort Stanwix (1768), which saved portions of Iroquois homeland but ceded areas in West Virginia and Kentucky to the British, lands Iroquois claimed by right of conquest. The occupants of the land, which included the Shawnee, were not signatory to the treaty, and they resisted the food of Anglo settlers that began pouring into the Ohio River valley.

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