GREAT LAKES NATIVE PEOPLES

Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2015) (From the book jacket: "Highlighting the long-standing rivals and relationships among the great Indian nations of North America, McDonnell shows how Europeans often played only a minor role in this history, and reminds us that it was native peoples who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of commerce and kinship, of which the French and British knew little. As empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms as trading posts and frontier forts, they played  crucial part in the making of early America.").