John P. Bowes

Bowes's book makes an important case for the localization of removal, rather than seeing Cherokee removal as the be-all, end-all of removal policy and how it operated. In many ways, Bowes's book takes that localization and makes it dizzyingly accurate--the chapters whip across location and time in their focus on each nation, and it can be difficult to keep all the actors in each chapter straight. The use of settler colonialism as a theoretical framework is also pretty underused--but the importance of his intervention is nonetheless made clear as the specificity with which he deals with each nation reveals the ways individuals in those nations navigated the options they were presented. The chapter on the Ojibwe and Odawa peoples in Michigan in particular were a very revealing look into the logics of removal and the way that Native people could negotiate various policies to try to maintain connection to their homelands… (más)