In The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America, Stephen Warren has constructed a remarkably coherent and inclusive history of Shawnees in early America. Warren chronicles three centuries of Shawnee diplomacy, trade, and movement, emphasizing the breadth of Shawnee influence across the boundaries and peoples of eastern North America. Additionally, The Worlds the Shawnees Made speaks to broader concerns about the construction of American Indian histories. Here, Warren challenges both colonial perceptions of the Shawnees as politically disorganized and geographically “wandering” peoples and contemporary historical interpretations that fixate on Native nation building. Thus, rather than emphasizing tribal coalescence and political progression, the narrative centers on the development of tribal villages and networks and the efforts of early Shawnees to maintain political independence in a tumultuous world.

As in his previous monograph, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors 1795–1870 (2009), Warren focusses on patterns of tribal migration and violence as he examines the proto-historic origins of the Shawnees. His examination of village-level society and structure is often not as strong as in his first book, and readers may struggle to understand how these external interactions shaped shifts or continuities in gender roles, cultural practices, or the organization of Shawnee society. However, this lack of clarity likely stems from the shortage of source material available for the seventeenth century.

The Worlds the Shawnees Made opens in the fifteenth century and traces the social and economic growth of the Fort Ancient peoples of the middle Ohio Valley. Warren then chronicles the movements of these early Algonquian speakers as they expanded their networks’ access to new European commodities. Capitalizing on these long-standing trade connections, their Shawnee descendants were able to carve out spaces in emerging colonial economies and adapt to the changing sociopolitical environment of the seventeenth-century eastern woodlands. In this section Warren makes compelling use of archaeological sources to challenge claims that Iroquois raiding was the primary force that shattered early Ohio Valley societies and to examine the ways that Native societies recovered from the trauma of colonial contact.

Part Two then investigates Shawnee participation in the upheaval of the violent borderlands at the edges of Iroquois and colonial territories and compares Shawnee diplomatic and economic activities with those of their neighbors. Their trade connections and wide linguistic range helped the Shawnees reinvent themselves in the seventeenth century as slave traders and merchants who connected the continental interior to the French and English Atlantic world. While their connections with outsiders pulled the tribe physically apart, it was also these relationships that helped define Shawnee identity. Furthermore, Warren argues that Shawnee presence and power on the edges of Native and colonial territories shaped the societies of their neighbors. For example, Shawnee raids encouraged the development of a shared identity and purpose for Englishmen on the coast and spurred Creek coalescence in the interior.

In the final portion of the book Warren evaluates mid-eighteenth-century Shawnee migrations away from Iroquois, British, and French centers of power. As both British and Iroquois leaders sought to subjugate and incorporate the Shawnees into their dominions, Shawnees along the eastern frontier relocated in order to preserve their independence. By demonstrating how Shawnee villages were able to maintain separate identities and economic independence while many of their Native neighbors, such as the Piscataways and Nanticokes, were absorbed by these expanding nations, Warren contests interpretations that link migrations to losses of power.

Beyond providing a historical narrative of the early Shawnees, The Worlds the Shawnees Made leads readers to question contemporary approaches to early American Indian history. As Warren emphasizes, narratives of nation building that focus on physical conglomeration and centralization of political power fail to explain the complexity of Shawnee actions. For groups like the Shawnees, who did not have “coherent identities that occupy neatly defined territories” (20), this approach tends to omit or oversimplify multiethnic communities and relationships. While some Shawnees did integrate themselves into Seneca, Cayuga, Creek, and other Indian groups, the Shawnees overwhelmingly rejected attempts by Iroquois and British colonists to incorporate them into their societies as dependents. Therefore our tendency to fixate on processes of national coalescence is anachronistic and contrary to the contemporary goals of most early Shawnees.

Thus Warren argues that Shawnees can best be interpreted as “parochial cosmopolitans” rather than as a protean nation. While the Shawnees dealt with a wide range of communities, nations, and empires across vast distances, Warren suggests that their sociopolitical systems and identities were centered on their villages. This explanation and approach works well for external examination of trade and political networks. Warren's analyses of cross-cultural interaction in multiethnic borderlands towns and his comparisons of the Shawnees with their Yuchi and Susquehannock neighbors are especially compelling. In The Worlds the Shawnees Made, Stephen Warren has not only made a substantial contribution to Shawnee history but also created an eloquent model for how to write the stories of American Indian communities that defy easy categorization.