AbstractPEACE, POWER AND PERSISTENCE: PRESIDENTS, INDIANS, AND PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN THE AMERICAN MIDWEST 1790-1860ByRebecca Lynn Nutt This dissertation explores the relationships between the Shawnee and Wyandot peoples in the Ohio River Valley and the Quaker and Methodist missionaries with whom they worked. Both of these Indian communities persisted in the Ohio Valley, in part, by the selective adoption of particular Euro-American farming techniques and educational methods as a means of keeping peace and remaining on their Ohio lands. The early years of Ohio statehood reveal a vibrant, active multi-cultural environment characterized by mutual exchange between these Indian nations, American missionaries, and Euro- and African-American settlers in the frontier-like environment of west-central Ohio. In particular, the relationships between the Wyandot and the Shawnee and their missionary friends continued from their time in the Ohio Valley through their removal to Indian Territory in Kansas in 1833 and 1843. While the relationships continued in the West, the missions themselves took on a different dynamic. The teaching methods became stricter, the instruction observed religious teaching more intensely, and the students primarily boarded at the school. The missionary schools began to more closely resemble the notorious government boarding schools of the late-nineteenth century as the missions became more and more entwined with the federal government. This work further allows an evaluation of the role that the U.S. government and the missionaries played in the shaping of Indian Removal and U.S. Indian policies, and examines the methods of Indian removal that go beyond the traditionally held images of the 1838 forced removal of the Cherokee nation.
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