Confluences Of Power / “That The Water Shall Remain Smooth”

“Confluences of Power: Mobility and Resistance in the Riverine Worlds of the Powhatan, 1570-1722” explores colonial policy designed to restrict the mobility of Powhatan peoples throughout early Virginia and considers how Indigenous groups navigated these imposed boundaries. Specifically, I argue that policies developed intentionally to prevent Native peoples from navigating the tidewater riverine system ultimately failed to constrain Powhatan movement, as individuals from the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, and other groups continued to transgress physical and legal boundaries well past the era of formal treaties of the 1670s that classified them as tributaries. Focusing largely on colonial attempts to restrict Indigenous movement and punitive measures against those who crossed boundaries regardless, this paper nonetheless attempts to center Powhatan relations to their environment, particularly waterways, in Indigenous reactions to colonial coercion. My second paper, “That the Water Shall Remain Smooth:” Ojibwe Ecological Knowledge, Place-Making, and Mobility in the Lake of the Woods Region, 1790-1873,” considers the role of specific environments and Ojibwe places within the Lake of the Woods basin during the nineteenth century as U.S. and Canadian settler colonial powers worked to establish the international boundary line through the region. Here, I focus less on colonial restrictions to Indigenous mobility, and more on the extent to which such limitations were not possible in the Lake of the Woods region, making places that were culturally, spiritually, and economically significant to the Ojibwe more significant than settler boundaries in the lives of the Anishinaabeg as well as the British and American traders, explorers, diplomats, and surveyors who moved through the area. In order to foreground the role of Ojibwe environments and the relations they engendered, I examine three key spaces within the waterscapes of the region—rivers, lakeshores, and islands within lakes—as well as the specific places that the Ojibwe constructed within them. I argue that each space offered different advantages to the Ojibwe who used them, as well as engendering specific relationships and kinds of engagement with the settlers who also depended on these areas and the Ojibwe people and places they contained. Ultimately, I contend that such places allowed the Ojibwe to resist the division of their lands and attempts to curtail their mobility at a key moment in the border-making process during the first half of the nineteenth century.