These early colonial conflicts can be considered ‘Indigenous revolutions’ to a small extent. Although the memory of these people must always be honored for how they sought to protect their homes, they lacked agency within these conflicts and ultimately were robbed of the sovereignty they fought for.
One commonality across these conflicts is that Indigenous communities were motivated by a desire to keep control over their lands, and mainly sided with different forces or remained neutral to try to protect their ways of living. This is especially evident in the view of Pontiac in ‘Pontiac Calls for War’ when in 1763 he described how the Indigenous people he was speaking to “had no need of gun nor powder, nor the rest of their things, and nevertheless you caught animals to live and clothe yourselves with their skins”. It seems that at this point, many Native communities were focused on the restoration and maintenance of their practices, and in these conflicts they sided with whoever seemed like they could help out with that more.
This history complicates the rhetoric of ‘liberty’ in post-revolutionary American even more, as it is clear just how many people were excluded from the ‘liberty’ that is so central to American national identity. After all, when the British were defeated in 1783, the crown relinquished all of its territory between the Appalachian mountains and the Mississippi without ever consulting Native communities, leaving the land up for grabs by settlers and forever changing the reality of Native communities on such a large swath of the continent. This reality only worsened with the War of 1812, especially with the worsening relations between Native communities and white settlers as conflicts worsened and the communities that sided with the British lost their protection.
I’d like to know more about how Native people lived in times of war. How did these conflicts affect their preexisting systems of gaining resources, and how did they adapt? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lack of historical record on this topic, but it would be cool to know.