The Chiefs Now in This City

Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America

By: Colin G. Calloway

Narrated by: David Colacci

During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity and adventurousness. They were frequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits. Colin Calloway, National Book Award finalist and one of the foremost chroniclers of Native American history, has gathered together the accounts of these visits and from them created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier."

Calloway captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels and lodging houses. In the Eastern cities they experienced an urban frontier, one in which the Indigenous world met the Atlantic world. Calloway reveals not just what Indians saw but how they were seen.

Their experience enriches and redefines standard narratives of contact between the First Americans and inhabitants of the American Republic, reminding us that Indian people dealt with non-Indians in multiple ways and places. The story of the country's beginnings was not only one of violent confrontation and betrayal, but one in which the nation's identity was being forged by interaction between and among cultures and traditions.

©2021 Oxford University Press (P)2022 Tantor

Interesting niche

This book provides an interesting inversion to frontier experience: to Amerindians, the imported European-style city was the frontier. The book provides interesting anecdotes and stories of important characters from this transitional time. Characters like Little Turtle, Corn Planter, and Teedyuscung. The Amerindian response to cities was as variable as Europeans responses to frontier living. Certain Indians were averse to the city, while others seemed excited by and open to the novel form of social organization than might be expected from anti-colonialist scholarship implying a uniform and unidirectional exploitation, appropriation, subjugation and humiliation. The Amerindians appeared alive and vital in this telling of their confrontation with the city despite the threat of disease and colonial violence, choosing to bravely face these numerous and strange Europeans in their settlements. For a time, you are able to forget the seeming “inevitable” demise of these people as viewed from the present and live as if the relationship between settlers and Indians could still be figured out if only more meetings and treaties could be hashed out. As an American, I feel a great loss that the early settlers could not figure out a way to have settlements without perpetually lying to and encroaching upon these first “settlers” of North America. What kind of country might we have now if the North American tribes were not so disfigured?

👍 Good book. Would’ve liked more quotes from Indian perspective, but writing down impressions was just not something many of them did back then. Reader also a little slow, listened at 1.2x but it was fine. Overall recommend to those interested in early America or Amerindian history.