Middle Ground or Native Ground? Material Culture at Iowaville

Ethnohistory 60:4 (Fall 2013) DOI 10.1215/00141801-2313831 Copyright 2013 by American Society for Ethnohistory

Middle Ground or Native Ground? Material Culture at Iowaville

Saul Schwartz, Princeton UniversityWilliam Green, Beloit College

Abstract. In the period circa 1765–1820, a time of imperial competition in central North America, Ioway Indians lived at a village site known today as Iowaville and interacted with colonial officials and traders representing Spain, Britain, and the United States. Ethnohistorians situate and contrast contemporary Indian- European relations in central and eastern North America as either a “middle ground” or a “native ground.” Yet these constructs reproduce the very narratives they were intended to challenge. By framing Indian responses to colonialism as a binary of assimilation or resistance, they reduce cultural production to an expression of underlying power structures, recalling simplistic acculturation models that link cul-tural continuity with relative strength and cultural change with relative weakness. Instead, we approach Iowaville and its social landscape via dialectical models that reconceptualize power as a product of cultural practice rather than a structure of cultural production. Material cultural practices were less reflections of power struc-tures than strategies to generate potentially powerful positions in relation to and relations with other indigenous and colonial interests.

During the contact period, the Ioway Indians shifted residential settlement locations between the Mississippi and Missouri River valleys of North America (fig. 1) as a means of managing challenges and opportunities related to subsistence, trade, and social relations (Green 2001; Blaine 1995; Wedel 2001). After generations of residence in the Great Plains along the Missouri River in the late seventeenth through mid- eighteenth centuries, Ioways moved into what is now southeast Iowa and established a village on the lower Des Moines River, only a one- or two- day journey from the Mis-sissippi, where they lived circa 1765–1820. This village is the location of an archaeological site known as Iowaville, 13VB124.

538 Saul Schwartz and William Green

The question we address concerns Ioway interactions with colonialism during their residence at Iowaville. Historians have presented two models for understanding Indian- European interaction in the North American interior from the mid- seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Richard White (1991) uses the metaphor of the “middle ground” to describe mutual accommodation, social blurring, and cultural hybridity in the Great Lakes circa 1650–1815. In contrast, Kathleen DuVal (2006) describes the Arkansas River valley until the early nineteenth century as a “native ground,” where Indians maintained their autonomy by incorporating Europeans into indigenous lifeways. Did Ioways compromise with colonial interests on a

Figure 1. Map of central North America showing locations mentioned in text. Cre-ated by the authors

Middle Ground or Native Ground? 539

middle ground during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or did they control interaction on their own native ground? To address this question, we apply an ethnohistoric approach and use methods from his-tory, archaeology, and material culture studies to interpret data from arti-facts and archives about Ioway- European interactions related to the pro-duction, consumption, and exchange of trade goods.

We suggest that both middle- and native- ground metaphors reproduce the narratives they were intended to challenge by framing Indian responses to colonialism as a binary of assimilation or resistance. Their interpreta-tions of dynamic material cultural processes recall simplistic acculturation models, which reduce cultural production to an expression of underlying power structures by drawing unwarranted correlations linking cultural con-tinuity with relative strength and cultural change with relative weakness. Returning to White’s theoretical influences, we find dialectical accounts of cultural reproduction and transformation in practice, which blur simple distinctions between cultural continuity and change and reconceptualize power as a product of cultural practice rather than a structure of cultural production.

This view better captures the complexities of colonial interaction at Iowaville, where material cultural practices were less reflections of power structures than strategies to generate potentially powerful positions in rela-tion to and relations with other indigenous and colonial interests in the social landscape. Even as Ioways used trade goods in ways that reproduced traditional meanings and practices, they also incorporated new technolo-gies into their cultural repertoire, which led both to classic “acculturation” and to accretion or syncretism in production and consumption as well as new social, political, and economic opportunities related to exchange. Our interpretation of Iowaville’s material culture sidesteps problematic assump-tions promoted by White and DuVal but also clarifies the continued rele-vance of middle- and native- ground metaphors as dialectical complements, rather than structural alternatives, in intercultural interaction.

Grounding Metaphors, Materially: Culture and Power in Colonial Interaction

Diverse receptions of The Middle Ground by historians over the past twenty years (including DuVal) reflect the sustained influence of White’s compelling historical account. In this essay, we focus on particular interpretive assump-tions about culture and power embedded in middle- and native- ground frameworks. We found these assumptions problematic when we tried to relate our research on material culture at Iowaville to White’s and DuVal’s


interpretations of trade goods and their general models; their frameworks seemed to obscure rather than reveal the social and cultural processes with which the production, consumption, and exchange of material culture were intertwined.

Since our goal is to elucidate certain assumptions underlying White’s and DuVal’s interpretations of material culture, our review of their texts is on the one hand schematic (focused on the points we think it would be productive to reexamine) and on the other hand concerned with issues that may seem marginal (since neither author’s focus is material culture per se). But it is precisely around the edges that frameworks fray in diagnostic ways. Discourse around seemingly marginal elements can reveal character-istic interpretive instabilities that remain less visible but still there when the framework is applied to more central material. We believe that middle- and native- ground approaches to material culture do in fact reveal problematic assumptions about culture and power with significant and systematic con-nections to their general models. To the extent that these assumptions are in some ways more obvious in the work of other historians who have joined the middle- and native- ground conversation, we agree with White (2011: xi–xii) that they are only questionably “misreadings.” The original texts themselves authorize certain forms of interpretive reductionism.

In Middle Ground, White describes how Algonquians and Europeans created worlds of “shared meanings and practices” from cultural differences (1991: ix–x) as an alternative to narratives that emphasize the destructive dimensions of colonial conquest and confine native responses to a binary frame of assimilation or resistance (xxv). While White’s picture of the pays d’en haut is controversial (e.g., Mazrim and Esarey 2007: 189–90 on his interpretation of protohistoric trade in the Illinois Country), his book’s influence in North American historiography has inspired broader conver-sations about whether other historical contexts can also be called middle grounds.

The middle ground’s mobility is complicated by its multiple reso-nances—it is a metaphor with at least “twinned meanings” (White 2006: 9). In general, it refers to a culture of intercultural interaction characterized by mutual accommodations that lead to blurred social boundaries and cultural hybridities (e.g., White 1991: 93). But the middle ground also refers to the “quite particular historical space” of the pays d’en haut (White 2006: 9), where as a result of mutual need and a balance of power, these compro-mises characterized Algonquian- European relations for more than a cen-tury. Algonquians desired European assistance in their conflicts with the Iroquois, and French and British officials needed Indians as trading part-ners and military allies to profit from the colonies and protect them from


imperial rivals, but neither Algonquians nor Europeans could force the other’s cooperation.

To the extent that middle grounds are made possible by mutual need and a balance of power, discussions about potential middle grounds outside the pays d’en haut focus on power structures. White himself suggests that the middle ground as mutual accommodation is common in human com-munication in general, but “the construction of a historical space in which the process becomes the basis of relations between distinct peoples is prob-ably less common” because “the space depended on the creation of an infra-structure that could support and expand the process, and this infrastruc-ture was . . . possible only when there was a rough balance of power and a mutual need between the parties involved” (2006: 10). Similarly, Philip J. Deloria writes that “it is exactly the question of power” and particularly “the idea that the middle ground rests on power relations having a struc-tural equivalence” that makes applying the middle ground beyond the pays d’en haut problematic (2006: 21–22).

DuVal believes historians have overextended the middle ground to contexts with unbalanced power dynamics: “Only relatively weak people desired the kind of compromises inherent in a middle ground. Cohesive native peoples preferred to maintain their own sovereign identities and make independent decisions regarding the ways they ran their societies and the uses to which they put their land and resources” (2006: 5). DuVal describes the Arkansas Valley as a “native ground,” where “Indians were more often able to determine the form and content of intercultural rela-tions than were their European would- be colonizers” (4).

Both models presume a particular relation between culture and power on the ground: that structural power relations in the world determine the cultural content of Indian- European interactional practices. This connec-tion then becomes the basis for an interpretive framework: since structural power relations are models within the minds of historical actors and there-fore not observable events themselves but rather observable in events, cul-tural practices are read as reflecting the underlying power relations assumed to produce them. This involves sorting out interactional practices according to whether they belong to one or the other cultural party to the interaction.

White is emphatic that “mediation” on a middle ground means more than “compromise”: “A middle ground is the creation, in part through cre-ative misunderstanding, of a set of practices, rituals, offices, and beliefs that although comprised of elements of the groups in contact is as a whole sepa-rate from the practices and beliefs of all of those groups” (2011: xiii). In other words, the middle ground is a set of hybrid practices derived from but not reducible to the practices of the groups involved. As he writes, “I con-


tend that in the pays d’en haut the French and the people I lump together as Algonquians created a hybrid world that, although derived from existing French and Indian worlds, was something new” (ibid.).

Determining whether interactional practices are hybrid in this sense seems to require comparing the interactional practices with the cultural practices of the interacting parties. Yet White writes, referencing Greg Dening’s Islands and Beaches (1980): “In The Middle Ground I was far less interested in examining the interior cultural world—the native islands—than in exploring the beaches from which the vast majority of surviving historical sources survive. In Dening’s terms, the middle ground was a kind of beach. A native world existed beyond it and was sometimes visible from it, but the existence of the beach did not depend on Europeans fully grasp-ing or sympathizing with what went on within the island” (2011: xx–xxi). While eighteenth century European historical actors may have misunder-stood “native islands,” White does not have the same luxury, since the notion of hybridity at the center of the middle ground depends on compar-ing the beaches to the islands in order to identify European, Indian, and novel hybrid elements. We will see below that White’s and DuVal’s interpre-tations of trade goods involve a functional analysis of their role in the native communities in which they were consumed.

Furthermore, since hybrid middle- ground interactional practices reflect underlying mutual need and balance of power, cultural hybridity is read as an index of interdependence and power equivalence, while inter-action that is more Indian than European indexes Indians’ relative strength and Europeans’ relative weakness and interaction that is more European than Indian indexes Europeans’ relative strength and Indians’ relative weak-ness. Like acculturation models of contact, these correlations linking cul-tural continuity with relative strength and cultural change with relative weakness reduce cultural production to an expression of underlying power structures.

White’s and DuVal’s interpretations of trade employ this frame-work. White describes the fur trade in the pays d’en haut as part of the middle ground because it combined models of exchange based on Algon-quian reciprocal kinship relations and French impersonal market capi-talism (1991: 97–98). But while Algonquian consumption of trade goods made these objects “as ‘Indian’ as moccasins,” they also remained “exotic,” which was the source of their value: “Indians now clearly desired goods they could not produce themselves, but more than that, they had integrated these valued goods into a series of social relationships on which the honor, power, and prestige of both individuals and groups depended” (104). Thus while “European goods entered village societies to serve familiar practi-


cal and symbolic purposes,” they were ultimately “subversive” because they “created new meanings and altered the meanings of old objects” (103).

Peter Cook observes that the middle- ground metaphor “merely delays the inevitable narratives of acculturation and resistance evoked in the book’s epilogue” (2008: 21–22). But this is not because White overlooks “ideologi-cal transformations in Native societies” (21) but because White correlates ideological transformations with structural weakness. White defines depen-dency as “the possibility that without European goods and the fur trade the Algonquians would no longer be able to feed, clothe, or house them-selves” and suggests that Algonquians were never dependent on European trade in this sense (1991: 128). However, White argues that Algonquians valued trade goods as symbolic capital and depended on them for social, if not biological, subsistence, which is central to his argument because it establishes the mutual need necessary for a middle ground (cf. Cook 2008: 21n27). If Algonquians were economically independent, there would be no motivation to engage in cross- cultural (mis)understandings, and the middle ground would collapse. Trade goods were “subversive,” then, in terms of their implications for both indigenous ideologies and political autonomy. The “new meanings” that exotic goods created when Algonquians incor-porated them into their social hierarchies forced Algonquians to meet their needs on a middle ground. White’s interpretation presents a causal relation between material cultural change and relative structural weakness in the form of Algonquian social dependence on European goods.

DuVal’s framework makes explicit the opposite side of the same coin: a causal relation between material cultural continuity and relative structural strength. Her key concept is “incorporation” in the specific sense of European conformity to indigenous (“local”) customs: “In the Arkansas Valley from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew a successive series of European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare” (DuVal 2006: 5).

DuVal’s interpretation of exchange follows this reasoning. “They [Indians] adopted European goods,” she writes, “but they set the terms of exchange, informed by a long history of trade with foreign peoples. Their world did change, but native peoples had the most influence over what form that change would take” (DuVal 2006: 246). Since the Arkansas Valley is defined as a native ground in the sense that Indians determined the terms of engagement with Europeans and incorporated them into indigenous social, political, and economic systems, the sign of Indian “influence” over interaction is assumed to be indigenous cultural continuity (see also DuVal


2007: 700 [“Relative power often determines whose idea of justice prevails in cross- cultural crime and punishment.”]). Accordingly, DuVal presents European participation in “local patterns” as an index of their relative weakness. In this context, Indian consumption of trade goods becomes a problematic hybridity for DuVal’s argument, the coherence of which is sus-tained by emphasizing compensating conditions of indigenous continuity in the encompassing social process of exchange.

We are not suggesting that correlations between cultural continuity and change and power structures are false but simply that they are contex-tual. In colonial settings where one party invests its power in assimilating the other, which in turn invests its own power in resisting that assimila-tion—a common dynamic in North America in the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries—it makes sense to assume that power structures will shape cultural performance. But now we are right back where we began: White’s goal was to move away from framing Indian responses to colonialism as a binary of assimilation or resistance; nevertheless, his and DuVal’s interpre-tations of culture and power reinforce these binaries by associating cultural continuity with relative strength and cultural change with relative weakness in a manner similar to acculturation and dependency models of the fur trade (e.g., Quimby 1966).

The problems with these interpretations of trade and material culture are familiar to historical archaeologists, who raise difficult questions about the identification and the significance of cultural continuity and change (Rubertone 2000). Labeling artifacts “Indian” or “European” is compli-cated because people tend to appropriate foreign practices and incorpo-rate them into their own cultural repertoires in a process not necessarily correlated with power dynamics. Research on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Kickapoo and Potawatomi sites in the western Great Lakes by Alice Berkson (1992), Mark J. Wagner (2001, 2011), and Mark R. Schurr (2010), for example, reveals complex identities and power dynam-ics even in social contexts where historical actors themselves embrace ide-ologies linking autonomy with cultural continuity. Trade goods make up the majority of artifacts recovered from towns aligned with nativist move-ments, while artifacts supposedly symbolizing nativist resistance, such as stone pipes, are found at sites where leaders pursued accommodationist strategies. Furthermore, Schurr (2010) finds that social ties with colonizers, rather than variables related to cultural continuity or change, correlate with successful resistance to removal. These findings problematize the kinds of acculturation- based dichotomous models that the middle- and native- ground metaphors draw from and could become.


We agree with Deloria that new “interlocked theorizations” of “cul-tural production” and “the workings of power in cross- social situations” are necessary and “could help make perceptible new kinds of power equiva-lences that might indeed produce other forms of the middle ground in other times and places” (2006: 22). In this context, however, moving forward involves returning to the theoretical grounding of Middle Ground itself. Two of White’s influences are evident in the epigraphs to the title chap-ter (1991: 50): Roy Wagner’s (1981) The Invention of Culture and Marshall Sahlins’s (1985) Islands of History. In contrast to middle- ground/native- ground discussions, in which cultural continuity and change are dichoto-mous indexes of power structures, Wagner and Sahlins elucidate dialectics of cultural reproduction and transformation, in which power emerges in social practice. They show us that not just cultures of interaction like the middle ground but also cultures themselves are inherently hybrid, and they show us how practices respond to perceived power structures by producing possibilities for new power relations as much as reflecting them. In short, Wagner and Sahlins offer an alternative model for understanding the rela-tion between culture and power in intercultural interaction over time.

As Joel Robbins points out, while Invention of Culture tends to be assimilated to “power and conflict” oriented frameworks, which “see cul-ture as a product of human efforts to dominate one another,” the work “starts from something more like an ontology of sense and sense- making” (2002: 5). In this context, White’s (1991: 50) epigraph from Wagner (1981: 16)—“For every time we make others part of a ‘reality’ that we alone invent, denying their creativity by usurping the right to create, we use those people and their way of life and make them subservient to ourselves”—should be understood in the reflexive context of a conceptual and ethical challenge within anthropology about the implications of cultural relativism. This challenge winds around a double bind within the anthropological culture concept, which recognizes difference only by assimilating variation to exist-ing cultural categories.

Wagner’s basic insight is that “invention and convention stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, a relationship of simultaneous inter-dependence and contradiction. This dialectic is the core of all human . . . cultures” (1981: 52). By dialectic, Wagner means “a tension or dialogue- like alternation between two conceptions or viewpoints that are simultaneously contradictory and supportive of each other” (ibid.). This is analogous to Sahlins’s (1985: 156) point about “the dialogue of sense and reference,” well captured by White’s (1991: 50) epigraph or even Sahlins’s own reading of Wagner:


As responsible for their own actions, people do become authors of their own concepts; that is, they take responsibility for whatever their cul-ture might have made them. For if there is always a past in the present, an a priori system of interpretation, there is also “a life which desires itself” (as Nietzsche says). This is what Roy Wagner . . . must mean by “the invention of culture”: the particular empirical inflection of mean-ing that is given to cultural concepts when they are realized as personal projects. (Sahlins 1985: 152)

Sahlins’s theory blurs sharp distinctions between cultural continuity and change in the “structure of the conjecture” (1985: xiv). “The transfor-mation of a culture,” Sahlins writes, “is a mode of its reproduction” (138) and vice versa, since “every reproduction of culture is an alteration, insofar as in action, the categories by which a present world is orchestrated pick up some novel empirical content” (144). The resulting system is “a synthesis in time of reproduction and variation” (ix).

Wagner’s and Sahlins’s interest in dialectics of conventional cul-tural structures and their inventive social development place them within the turn to practice in anthropology (Handler 2002), which developed as a reaction to the power structural determinism of previous frameworks, such as world- systems theory (Ortner 1984: 144). Sahlins critiques world- systems theory for confusing an “open system and a lack of system”—in other words, for assuming that a system open to change has no structure—and continues, “World- system theory itself allows for the preservation of satellite cultures, as the means of reproduction of capital in the dominant European order. But if so, from the alternate vantage of the so- called domi-nated people, European wealth is harnessed to the reproduction and even the creative transformation of their own cultural order” (1985: viii).

In switching from the perspective of the world system to the “alternate vantage of the so- called dominated people,” Sahlins reverses the conven-tional relation in world systems theory between culture and power—power becomes a product of cultural practice rather than a structure of cultural production. Satellites are more than a means of metropolitan reproduction: peripheral societies can generate potentially powerful positions by using core resources to effect both cultural reproduction and transformation. In this framework, power structures do not determine cultural production but are themselves reproduced and transformed within dialectics of cultural practice as historical actors encounter each other and the world.

As Sahlins puts it elsewhere, “cultures of resistance” are less common than “the resistance of culture,” the way “people make sense of and react to things over the horizon in terms of their already existing schemes of intelli-


gibility” (2005: 4). To the extent that people can follow “their own cultural lights,” “their culture is the condition of the possibility of their historical agency” (ibid.). Similarly, Wagner locates power within dialogic semi-otic processes, whether it is anthropology making others “subservient” by assimilating cultural difference to its own conception of reality or Melane-sian cargo cults and their “symbolic use of European wealth to represent the redemption of native society” (1981: 31–32).

Despite these theoretical influences, Middle Ground perpetuates a dis-cussion that assumes that power structures determine the content of inter-cultural interaction based on simplistic acculturation models of cultural continuity and change. In what follows, we present a narrative of Iowaville sensitive to what Wagner and Sahlins would characterize as the essentially dialectical, but rarely dichotomous, nature of cultural practice. We believe an approach derived from Wagner and Sahlins makes more sense of our data than borrowing middle- or native- ground models and their ways of interpreting material culture. A similar approach, if not this particular way of coming to it, has been embraced by historical archaeologists, notably Kathleen L. Ehrhardt (2005) in her research on protohistoric Illinois metal-working. Or, as Stephen W. Silliman writes, “What if change and conti-nuity—as we often think about it in archaeology—are thought of as the same process?” (2005: 66). Rather than rejecting the middle- and native- ground metaphors, however, we hope to clarify their resonance within Wagner’s and Sahlins’s frameworks.

Locating Iowaville

The Ioway, Otoe, and Missouria all speak dialects of Chiwere and trace their ancestry to the Ho- Chunk people, who speak a closely related Cen-tral Siouan language. The Oneota archaeological tradition probably repre-sents the precontact and protohistoric archaeological record of the Chiwere groups as well as the Ho- Chunk and Dhegihan- speaking groups (Grif-fin 1937; Henning 1998; Mott 1938). Archaeological, oral- historical, and documentary evidence all suggest that the protohistoric and early historic Ioway population was relatively small, occupied few villages at a time, and engaged in a mixed economy of farming and hunting. Ioways are the sub-ject of a number of ethnohistoric overviews (D. C. Anderson 1973a, 1973b; Blaine 1995; Olson 2008; Wedel 2001) and studies of the early contact era (Wedel 1976, 1981, 1986) and the American (post- 1815) period (Bernstein 2007; Meyer 1962). Historical archaeological work has attempted to locate specific villages in Iowa (Straffin 1972), Missouri (Roberts and Rickers 1996), and Illinois (Nolan 1987). Material culture studies have focused on


sacred bundles in museum collections (Foster 1994). Our research on Iowa-ville trade and material culture complements previous work on other peri-ods and topics in Ioway history.

Iowaville (fig. 1) is the best- documented Ioway archaeological site. Nearly all of the temporally diagnostic material from the main site area dates to 1765–1820, the time of Ioway occupation on the lower Des Moines River as documented by multiple, independent historical sources. In an 1836 petition to the president (Blaine 1995: 164–65) and at a treaty council the following year1 during which they presented a map of their historical migrations (Green 2001; Bernstein 2012; G. M. Lewis 1987; Warhus 1997; Whelan 2003), Ioway leaders described two villages on the Des Moines River occupied during the time of contact with the French and Spanish, one called “the dry field” and the other “the big groove” (perhaps a mis-transcription of “the big grove”). Other Ioway leaders and an 1847 Ioway map of historical village locations also noted an Ioway village on the lower Des Moines (McKenney and Hall 1836: 142–43; Schoolcraft 1853: 256–59). Spanish colonial officials (Blaine 1995: 57–71), British and French Creole traders (T. G. Anderson 1882: 151; Chouteau 1940: 140), and American offi-cials and explorers (Blaine 1995: 81–138) all mention an Ioway village on the lower Des Moines. Contemporary European and American maps show an Ioway village and no other village in the area (e.g., Cohen 2002: 81, 87, 93, 95, 103; Temple 1975: plates 80, 83; Tucker 1942: plates 31B, 32B, 39; Wood 1983: plate 13B). Finally, local histories (compiled by Peterson and Artz 2006) and the toponym “Iowaville” itself indicate that Ioways occupied the site before Sauks and Americans. Therefore, we are confident that Iowaville is an Ioway site, either “the dry field” or “the big groove.” Some material from the site may represent later Sauk (1830s) and American (1830s–1860s) occupations, but archaeological evidence places those communities eleven hundred and six hundred meters, respectively, west of the Ioway site.

The only known account of Iowaville’s founding comes from an 1816 report on the boundaries of tribal lands in the Illinois and Missouri Ter-ritories prepared by fur trader turned United States peace commissioner Auguste Chouteau (1940). According to Chouteau, hostile neighboring tribes forced the Ioways, weakened perhaps by smallpox (Bernstein 2007: 610), to move from the Missouri River to the lower Des Moines in 1765. Before moving, however, Ioway representatives traveled to St. Louis to ask Pierre Laclède, Chouteau’s stepfather and business partner, whether he would send traders to their new location. “His answer being favorable,” Chouteau writes, “about one half of the Tribe moved in the Same year to the Country they had designated being about hundred & fifty miles up the river des Moins” (1940: 140). Laclède sent two traders to supply the Ioways


at their new location, and the rest of the tribe relocated over the next few years. While their primary motivation was to escape hostile neighbors, Chouteau’s recollection also reveals the extent to which Ioways valued trade: Ioways checked with Laclède before they moved, and they relocated only after Laclède assured them that he would send traders to their new village.

While the Ioways may have moved to Iowaville partly to take advantage of trading opportunities from St. Louis, they also traded with British firms. From 1763 to 1803, Spanish administrators expected Indians in Louisiana to participate in trade networks operated by French Creole families in St. Louis. Yet at least six North West Company posts were established along the lower Des Moines in the later years of the eighteenth century (C. Peter-son 2009: 18–23; Peterson and Artz 2006) and shipped packs of peltries and skins and kegs of grease through British networks to Green Bay, Macki-nac, Canada, and beyond (e.g., Sibley 1874).

These British trading posts represented both lost profits and a secu-rity risk to Spanish officials, who believed Ioway allegiance was necessary for Spain to secure its territory against British invasion (e.g., Nasatir 1930, 1931; Van der Zee 1914a, 1914b; Woolworth 2010). Spanish authorities singled out the Des Moines River as the route by which Ioway middlemen gave British interests access to the Otoes and other tribes on the upper Mis-souri. Surveyor- General Antoine Pierre Soulard’s 1795 map of Louisiana illustrates “the encroachments of the English companies on Spanish terri-tory” and labels the Des Moines the “route the English take to trade on the Missouri River” (Wood 1996: 190, 196).

The location of Iowaville midway between Spanish and British centers of colonial influence at St. Louis and Prairie du Chien, respectively (fig. 1), makes good geopolitical sense, as Ioways played on competing imperial insecurities for their own interests. At the same time, their position on the Des Moines rather than the Mississippi River provided some insulation from their more numerous Sauk and Meskwaki neighbors (Blaine 1995: 90).

Material Culture in Practice: Production, Consumption, Reproduction

In 2010, Cindy L. Peterson of the Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA), University of Iowa, directed the first controlled archaeological testing at Iowaville. Decades of previous collecting and metal detecting generated large collections of trade goods and locally produced materials. In 1970, Dean F. Straffin (1972) and Anton Till (1976) made the first documented collections from the site for the OSA and observed several artifact concen-


trations, suggesting multiple house or lodge structures and associated stor-age and refuse deposits. They recovered a wide assortment of historic- era material, which is curated by the OSA and was examined in the current study.

Since 1970, collectors have gathered thousands of artifacts from the site’s surface and have used metal detectors to recover near- surface material. The use of metal detectors introduces a bias in the collections for metal arti-facts. Stories circulate of collectors camping at the site for months at a time, and the intensity of collecting over the decades has made surface artifacts relatively scarce. The pre- 2010 OSA collection and several recently exam-ined private collections total more than eighty- five hundred artifacts and floral and faunal remains from the site (C. Peterson 2012b; Schwartz and Green 2011).

The assemblage includes: glass beads; brass, copper, and silver adorn-ments; brass and iron tools and containers; gun parts, gunflints, and lead shot; metal arrow points; stone pipes and manufacturing debris; native- made and Euro- American ceramics; and glass. The 2010 test excavations recovered a similar range of material (C. Peterson 2012a). Deer bones domi-nate faunal remains from the site (Haury- Artz 2012; Hill and Green 2001), reflecting the importance of deer hides in the region’s “fur” trade by circa 1800 (Thorne 1996: 92).

Much of the Iowaville assemblage is related to personal decoration, aesthetic values, and the social functions of display in constituting status and gender roles. Tinkling cones and beads would have adorned clothing of various kinds. Scholars have noted the prevalence of cloth, clothing, and blankets, which rarely survive in archaeological contexts, in trading com-pany inventories in the Great Lakes (e.g., D. L. Anderson 1994; B. M. White 1987, 1998a). Records from the US customs house at Mackinac indicate the large variety and volume of cloth involved in the lower Des Moines trade with Ioways (Schwartz 2008, 2012). Portraits of Ioway leaders from the 1830s (McKenney and Hall 1836, 1842) and daguerreotypes from the 1840s (Ewers 1968) show Ioways wearing blankets, headscarves, beaded neck-laces, and beaded or silver earrings. While these images were made after the period of Ioway residence at Iowaville, some of the leaders shown had lived there a few decades earlier. Stone smoking pipes, some made of catli-nite (red pipestone, from southwest Minnesota; see fig. 1) and some of a gray, likely local, limestone, constitute the majority of exclusively native- made objects found at the site (Green 2002; Wisseman and Hughes 2012). Tobacco rituals were crucial elements of trade and interaction (see below).

Gun parts and projectile points recovered from the site illustrate the complex interplay of cultural continuity and change in material cul-


tural practices at Iowaville. Disarticulated gun parts and the presence of stripped and nearly stripped lockplates indicate that Ioways repaired their own firearms by salvaging and recycling working parts. This practice is also documented at Osage and Kickapoo sites of the same era (Hamilton 1960a, 1960b: 132, 1980). At the contemporary Big Village site, an Omaha settlement on the Missouri River, one man had a reputation for doing all firearms repair in the community and was buried with “a veritable spare parts inventory” (O’Shea and Ludwickson 1992: 176–77). The distribution of gun repair knowledge in the Iowaville community was perhaps more widespread. Ioways also manufactured lead shot on site, which left casting debris, including sprue.

At the same time that Ioways mastered these technologies, they also modified gun parts in ways that diverged from Euro- American practices. They systematically broke serpent sideplates—brass pieces screwed to the left side of the stock, opposite the lockplate—in ways that suggest their symbolic significance beyond utility as gun parts. The Northwest trade gun, widely used in the fur trade during the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, was outfitted with a serpent- shaped side-plate (Reid 1978; Russell 1957: 127–30). While it is unclear exactly how or why Ioways modified sideplates, William A. Fox interprets identical side-plate fragments from Northern Algonquian sites as representing hunting magic expressing “conceptions of spiritual power and . . . hunting success” related to a horned serpent/feline water spirit (1992: 31). A nineteenth- century photograph depicts a Blackfoot man wearing a breastplate made of six serpent sideplates (Karklins 1992: 110–11). At the Leavenworth site in South Dakota, a circa 1803–32 Arikara village, archaeologists recovered a number of modified gun parts, including two serpent sideplates; one was broken in half and the other “complete specimen is bent into an open ellipse and was obviously used as a bracelet” (Krause 1972: 79).

Central Siouan peoples may have been similarly motivated to remove and modify these potent symbols from their weaponry. The sideplate frag-ments from Iowaville display similar bending patterns to those described by Fox (1992: 23), who argues that sideplates were “wrenched from firearms” by removing one or two screws, then prying and twisting. In addition, one tail fragment’s edges have been smoothed and rounded, and several frag-ments’ interior surfaces have three or more straight, engraved marks made by a sharp tool (Steve Hyde, personal communication, 8 March 2009).

Like Algonquians, Central Siouan peoples had a notion of a horned serpentine/feline water spirit, known in Ioway as Ischéxi (Skinner 1926: 253). In Ioway mythology, Ischéxi are powerful and dangerous creatures who are often killed by heroes (Skinner 1925: 432–33, 468–71); in one story,


Ischéxi is a man’s dream guardian who carries him across a river (476). Representations or fossils of Ischéxi were components of Ioway sacred bundles, and Ischéxi is possibly depicted on the Black Bear Clan pipe bowl (Foster 1994: 150, 171, 178).

Snakes also had sacred associations for Ioways. The word for snake, wakán, is glossed as “the actor, the thing [the prefix wa- ] that embodies the verb root kán—a quality of God” (Goodtracks 2007: 87). According to eth-nographer Alanson Skinner’s (1925: 426) informants, telling sacred myths (wékan) in the summer was taboo and would provoke an attack by snakes. Early missionaries reported that snakes were killed only for ritual purposes and were placated by snake doctors if seen around the village (Blaine 1995: 191). Lance Foster (1994: 261) found sixteen snake elements in his inven-tory of Ioway sacred bundles in museum collections. One Buffalo Doctor bundle contained a snake described by its collector, M. R. Harrington, as a “Japanese toy” (Foster 1994: 251), perhaps a serpent sideplate. According to Harrington’s fieldnotes, Ioways told him that snake parts were included in sacred bundles because they could give snakelike powers to those using the bundles (Foster 1994: 239, 247, 256). While we cannot say with cer-tainty that Ioways interpreted their sideplates as images of Ischéxi and ritu-ally killed them for hunting magic, it does seem likely that they recognized sideplates as powerful symbols—whether of Ischéxi or simply a snake—for ritual manipulation.

Even as Ioways incorporated firearms along with associated techni-cal knowledge into their cultural repertoire, this did not represent a step toward acculturation so much as accretion or syncretism, if acculturation means the functional replacement of native by Euro- American material culture: bow- and- arrow technology continued to be produced, used, and transmitted into the early twentieth century. Ioways who grew up at Iowa-ville remembered killing “squirrels and other small game with the bow and arrow” before learning to hunt fowl with shotguns and deer and elk with rifles (McKenney and Hall 1842: 60, 89). Bow- and- arrow technology per-sisted into at least the middle of the nineteenth century because it was pre-ferred for mounted buffalo hunting (Morgan 1959: 99). Ioways continued to manufacture bows and arrows into the early twentieth century; though “virtually things of the past” by that time, they were among the few remain-ing objects of contemporary native manufacture collected by Skinner (1926: 287–88). For Ioways, firearms were not necessarily a replacement for bows and arrows, and cultural mechanisms preserved and transmitted knowledge about bow- and- arrow technology alongside firearm technology.

Bow- and- arrow technology did change from older patterns in some ways, however. The Iowaville collections include metal projectile points


fashioned from iron and brass—including recycled brass kettle fragments—but no chipped stone points that can be attributed to the Ioway occupation, indicating that metalworking replaced chipped stone weapon technology. In 1822, Paul Wilhelm (1973: 249), traveling up the Missouri, noted that the Ioways were “skilled smiths and know how to make many household articles themselves,” including arrows with iron tips, made from “old knife blades” and other recycled metal.

The Iowaville assemblage clearly demonstrates Ioway agency in the production and consumption of goods. The complex processes of use, repair, recycling, and modification blur the distinction between produc-tion and consumption as well as the dichotomy between cultural continuity and change. Ioways understood objects according to their own cultural logics and used them for their own purposes, which led, even within the single functional category of hunting technology, to both classic “accultura-tion” (the replacement of chipped stone manufacturing with metalworking) and accretion or syncretism (the addition of firearms without the replace-ment of bows and arrows). These modes of incorporation illustrate dia-lectical processes of reproduction and transformation in material cultural practices, as Ioways made decisions about technologies and trade goods that they believed furthered their own interests; but they reveal little about underlying power structures. To sort these cultural practices into “Indian” and “exotic” elements and read the results as products and indexes of underlying power structures would be counterproductive because it would lead us into premature conclusions about dependence (social or otherwise) and autonomy. We believe it is more reasonable to assume that cultures are always dynamic and simple inertia rare: “the persistence . . . of the old” can be no more presumed than the “creation of the new” (White 2011: xxi), and the social work invested in producing old and new cultural practices can be better explained as future- oriented projections of anticipated or hoped- for positions rather than retrospective reflections on existing (and therefore already past) states of affairs.

Other recorded material cultural practices, however, do evoke dynam-ics of Ioway- European interaction. According to the Ioway leader No Heart of Fear, who had lived at Iowaville2 (McKenney and Hall 1836: 141–42, 1842: 60), when a smallpox epidemic struck Iowaville around 1800, the commu-nity responded by sacrificing dogs and “throwing away” offerings, includ-ing garments, blankets, and a British flag (Dorsey 1894: 426). The inclusion of trade goods (garments and blankets) and a gift likely received in a diplo-matic context (the flag) alongside more traditional offerings (dogs) demon-strates that Ioways incorporated trade goods into their religious practices. Foster reports that Ioway sacred bundles also contain objects of European


manufacture following two logics: on one hand, “simple technological sub-stitution” (of steel for bone needles in tattooing bundles or of cloth for skin wrappings) and, on the other hand, “the process of addition to the native system” of ideologically significant items, including paper labels from Euro-pean and American medicine bottles, which represent an openness to alien ideologies in the “supposedly conservative bundle system” (1994: 268–69).

No Heart’s recollection also suggests the Iowaville community may have had a more ambiguous relationship with trade than Chouteau’s notes indicate. It is impossible to say with certainty why the Ioway selected trade goods and diplomatic gifts to “throw away” in offering. Did Ioways consider these goods especially valuable? Or did the community perceive a connec-tion between smallpox and European objects and target them for removal? While this episode raises more interpretive questions than it answers, it does illustrate the potentially surprising resonances of political symbols in the frontier borderlands. The presence of the British flag among trade goods and canine offerings hints not only at competition between Britain and Spain in the region but also at Ioway participation in that rivalry to fur-ther their own interests. The relationship Ioways established with Laclède at St. Louis in the 1760s was not an exclusive one if thirty years later they were receiving, and sacrificing, British flags.

Trade, Theft, Gift: Modes of Exchange

The availability of trade with companies based both in British and Span-ish territory played an important role in the location of Iowaville on the lower Des Moines River, where Ioways could maximize their access to trade opportunities and take advantage of imperial rivalries and insecuri-ties to further their own interests. Since the 1980s, social historians of the fur trade have shown that intermarriage between Euro- American men and Indian women was the foundation of trade because in many native societies, goods flowed through kinship networks characterized by reciprocal obli-gations (e.g., Brown 1980; Murphy 2000; J. Peterson 1985; Sleeper- Smith 2001; Thorne 1996). Traders quickly realized that it was advantageous to enter these kinship networks by marrying into the groups with which they traded. The catlinite and limestone pipes and pipe manufacturing debris from Iowaville denote the importance of such practices among the Ioway. Calumet pipe ceremonialism grew in importance among Central Siouan peoples during the late precontact era and was the method by which these groups integrated foreigners into their social and economic worlds as rela-tives and trading partners (Thorne 1996).


Traders who had Ioway marriage ties fared better in the long run than those who did not. Denis Julien, for example, married an Ioway woman and worked out of St. Louis trading with Ioways starting in the 1790s (Knip-meyer 2001: 246–49). In 1801–2 a competitor, Quebec- born Thomas Gum-mersall Anderson (the future superintendent of Indian Affairs of Canada), spent his second- ever trading season with the Ioway on the Des Moines River, working for Jacob Franks’s company based in Green Bay. Anderson describes a dispute that occurred after Julien reneged on an agreement to wait on the Des Moines until the Ioways returned from their hunt in the spring, instead of following them to their Missouri River hunting grounds. When Anderson discovered that Julien had sent two men up the Missouri with goods to steal Anderson’s credits, he and his men marched overland to the Missouri, where they surprised Julien’s men, set up shop just before the Ioways came in with their furs, and “made a splendid season’s trade” (T. G. Anderson 1882: 151–52).

While Anderson made out well for the season, he did not enjoy long- term success in the Iowa region. He spent the following year with the Ho- Chunk on the Rock River vying with a métis trader before he tired of competing with traders with kinship connections (T. G. Anderson 1882: 152). The inexperienced Anderson had learned his lesson about kinship and trade. He relocated his operations to what is now Wisconsin and Minnesota and in 1805 married Margaret Agnes (Grey Cloud) Aird, niece of the Dakota leader Wabasha. Anderson traded successfully with the Dakotas and other groups for many years thereafter (T. G. Anderson 1882; Case 1915).

Julien continued to trade with the Ioway until at least 1816 (Knipmeyer 2001: 249–59). His long- term success reflects his participation in Ioway kinship networks and associated rules and practices of reciprocity. Antoine Robidoux (H. M. Lewis 2004: 257), whose family conducted extensive trade with Ioways, later employed Julien as an engagé. Julien had been trad-ing with Ioways long before Anderson showed up and continued to trade with them long after he left. Whether the details of Anderson’s reminis-cence about his early tiff with Julien can be trusted or not, it is clear that while Anderson would have been content to let the Ioways transport their furs to him as he spent the winter on the Des Moines hunting and whittling, Julien—despite whatever agreement he might have had with Anderson—could have been obligated by his kin to meet them on their hunting grounds to receive and transport the furs himself.

While traders who established native kinship ties generally experienced greater long- term success whether they were trading through St. Louis or the Great Lakes and regardless of whether their employers were of French


or British descent (Thorne 1996), Anderson and other British traders from Canada were able to compete with traders like Julien despite staying for only one or two seasons and lacking local kinship connections. Julien had longer- term success, but Ioways were more than willing to do business with traders like Anderson, too. Trade seems to have taken place on both middle and native grounds, with room for multiple business strategies.

While Ioways pursued foreign goods primarily through trade, they also appropriated goods by force and received them as gifts, complementary means of acquisition also found among Great Lakes groups (B. M. White 1994, 1998b). In September 1792, Zenon Trudeau, lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana, reported to his superior, Governor Carondelet, that Ioways from a village on the Des Moines had stolen thirty- eight horses from the Spanish settlement of San Carlos (later St. Charles, Missouri) (Nasa-tir 1952: 160). In his reply, Carondelet acknowledged the limits of Spanish authority in the region, telling Trudeau: “You . . . must see if there is any remedy for what has happened, or if the Iowas are a nation from whom the stolen horses may be reclaimed, in which case you will do it (recover them) and you will suggest to me the means which appear to you to be feasible” (Nasatir 1952: 163). Trudeau was unsuccessful in his efforts even by May 1793, eight months after the theft occurred. Trudeau’s frustration is evident in his report to the governor:

I have tried in every way possible to obtain from the “Nacion Ayoas”, the thirty- eight horses stolen from the San Carlos establishment and through my orders and words sent to the leaders, they have killed the man that had committed said theft, promising they would return the horses this spring, a promise which as yet has not been fulfilled and a fact which makes me feel like sending another order demanding an answer on the first day. If I succeed in getting said horses, it will be the first satisfaction of this nature which this rule has achieved from the Indians, who in general are thieves now more than ever. (Nasatir 1952: 173–74)

Two months later, Trudeau was finally able to report that he had “received the most complete satisfaction” from the Ioways, who replaced the stolen horses. He feasted the Ioways and gave them gifts to reward them for making amends and because he needed them to “guard” the Des Moines River. But, he complained: “With all that, they still were not happy. All these nations who trade with the English and go to receive gifts at Michi-limaquinac are very given to drink and accustomed to receive the best of large gifts. They refused and mocked at the ones received from us, show-


ing us what they have received in said Michilimaquinac in silverware, fine material, coats bordered with silver and gold, etc.” (Nasatir 1952: 184–85).

While his correspondence reveals limitations on Spanish authority in the region, Trudeau was able to persuade the Ioways to replace the stolen horses, much to his and the governor’s surprise. But the Ioways had their own reasons for making amends. Along with the horses, they brought Trudeau five Kansa captives and asked him to return them to their people and broker peace between the Ioway and Kansa (ibid.). It is probably not a coincidence that the Ioways returned the horses when they wanted to involve the Spanish in diplomacy on their behalf.

While Ioways were powerful enough to take the horses, ignore Trudeau’s timetable for returning them, mock his gifts, and flaunt their con-tact with the British, they also recognized the value of good relations with influential Spanish officials. Things could have been otherwise: Trudeau and Carondelet were the first to recognize the Spanish did not have much leverage. While these Spanish officials believed they were operating on a native ground—the Ioways were relatively autonomous—the interaction itself was not determined by structural considerations of force, and an unexpected middle ground emerged. As a relatively small group, the Ioways had long been skilled diplomats and knew the value of compromise in cul-tivating good relations with neighbors. Just because they could steal Span-ish horses and get away with it did not make that the course of action that would best serve Ioway interests. In these exchanges of horses, gifts, and captives, the interactions seem less reflections of historical agents’ percep-tions of power structures than strategies to generate powerful positions in relation to and relations with other indigenous and colonial interests in the social landscape.

Conclusion

While the Ioway strategy of playing off all sides of imperial rivalries proved successful for many decades, it also factionalized their small community at critical historical junctures, including the American Revolution (Blaine 1995: 64–67) and the War of 1812 (Blaine 1995: 112–13; Olson 2008: 52). Following the War of 1812, Ioways cultivated closer relations with the United States but were nevertheless compelled by Sauk pressure to leave the Des Moines for the Missouri in 1819 (Olson 2008: 70–71). The story here comes full circle: the same dynamics of intertribal and intercolonial competition that drew Ioways from the Missouri to the Des Moines in 1765 drew them back to the Missouri almost fifty- five years later.


Ioways relocated to the lower Des Moines in the middle of the eigh-teenth century both in keeping with traditional patterns of intertribal competition and migration and to exploit the opportunities presented by new dynamics of imperial competition in the Mississippi Valley. During their residency at Iowaville, Ioways were skilled diplomats and traders and sophisticated producers and consumers. They exchanged, used, repaired, recycled, and modified objects following their own cultural lights (Sahlins 2005: 4). Some of these practices, such as the ritual removal of serpent sideplates from firearms or the persistence of bow- and- arrow technology, reproduced conventional meanings; others, such as the substitution of metalworking for chipped stone production, reflected new social, political, and economic opportunities. In this context, cultural continuity and change are not dichotomous indexes of power structures but strategic dialectical processes of potential power production. Middle- and native- ground meta-phors gain renewed interpretive utility in such a framework. Ioway modes of exchange involved the coexistence of middle and native grounds in trade and alternation between middle and native grounds in theft and gifting. If we think of middle and native grounds like power—that is, as social prod-ucts of cultural practice in dialectics of simultaneous reproduction and transformation—they can continue to help elucidate processes of accom-modation and autonomy in historical Indian- European interaction.

Notes

Funding for this research was provided by the Logan Museum of Anthropology and the Department of Anthropology at Beloit College with a grant from the Mouat and Whiteford Endowed Research Fund. We would also like to thank Rob LaFleur, Ellen Joyce, and the staff of the Office of the State Archaeologist, University of Iowa. Finally, we thank the anonymous Ethnohistory reviewers for their comments and suggestions. 1 Journal of Treaty Proceedings with the Sacs and Foxes, October 1837, Docket

138, Sac and Fox Exhibit 121, McCarter and English, US Indian Claims Cases Records, box 3, folder 1, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton Univer-sity, Princeton, NJ.

2 Ibid.

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