Winner of the 2023 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize for best book in western environmental history from the Western History Association Indigenous power in a significant cultural and ecological borderland In People of the Ecotone , Robert Morrissey weaves together a history of Native peoples with a history of an ecotone to tell a new story about the roots of the Fox Wars, among the most transformative and misunderstood events of early American history. To do this, he also offers the first comprehensive environmental history of some of North America’s most radically transformed landscapes―the former tallgrass prairies―in the period before they became the monocultural “corn belt” we know today. Morrissey situates the complex rise and fall of the Illinois, Meskwaki, and Myaamia peoples from roughly the collapse of Cahokia (thirteenth to fourteenth century CE) to the mid-eighteenth century in the context of millennia-long environmental shifts, as changes to the climate shifted bison geographies and tribes adapted their cultures to become pedestrian bison hunters. Tracing dynamic chains of causation from microscopic viruses to massive forces of climate, from the deep time of evolution to the specific events of human lifetimes, from local Illinois village economies to market forces an ocean away, People of the Ecotone offers new insight on Indigenous power and Indigenous logics. "By placing the reader in the grand village of Kaskaskia, the stronghold of the Illini people, Robert Morrissey offers a new way to understand the history of the interior plains and its many peoples. Blending Indigenous, environmental, and colonial history, People of the Ecotone is a significant contribution to the history of North America."―Pekka Hämäläinen, author of Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power "Morrissey brings a superb level of knowledge about the Indigenous past that few scholars can rival, and he successfully integrates it with his unique, innovative environmental research."―Susan Sleeper-Smith, author of Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 " People of the Ecotone is a triumph of continental history, narrating early American history from within the Indigenous heartland of North America, and revealing a Native World created by the intertwining of human and other-than-human life."―Michael Witgen (Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), author of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America "Combining the best of environmental history with cutting edge Native American and Indigenous Studies approaches, Morrissey crafts a compelling narrative that forces readers to rethink the histories of the tallgrass prairies and their peoples. This is groundbreaking new work."―Elizabeth Ellis (Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma), author of The Great Power of Small Nations Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South " People of the Ecotone will interest a wide audience of readers across historically oriented fields of Native American studies, as well as critical scholars of Native and Indigenous studies concerned with issues of representation and historical memory. Morrissey's critical approach to the ecotone as unit for geographical analysis will also serve as mode of departure for others who wish to interrogate the spatial logics of colonialism and their possible alternatives."― Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal "Morrissey's recontextualization succeeds at placing Euro-American historical perspectives within an Indigenous frame, while the ecotone operates to thwart histories of the Fox Wars that decontextualize the political economy born from this mid-continent ecotone."― Environmental History "This book should alert environmental historians and historians of borderlands and Native American history to new ways of thinking about cross-cultural interactions in the entangled environments of North America and beyond. As historians continue to integrate works of environmental history with interpretations of cross-cultural dynamics in early America and beyond, Morrissey’s work should serve as a lodestar to future methods and understandings."― American Historical Review "It is impossible to do justice to Morrissey's subtle and complicated arguments in a brief review. This book is dense but elegantly written, a masterful argument for why historians need to look at place first, understanding how environment shapes human relations in order to appreciate the logic of Native adaptations and cultural constructs, even dark ones. It is this complex interplay between environment and culture that illuminates very human choices and indigenous agency, even when the violence of settler colonialism seems an easier answer."― Pacific Historical Review "Morrissey reveals the intersection of ecological forces that shaped an icredible, dynamic interplay of people and tall grass prairie and forest ecosyste