Although they were recently (July 1993) denied official federal recognition, approximately 2,700 Miami Indians currently live in loose communities scattered from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne, and the tribe maintains an administrative center at modern Peru, Indiana, in the heart of their ancestral homeland. These modern Miamis are the descendants of a confederacy of Native American peoples who once dominated the Wabash Valley, controlled the portages between the Wabash and Maumee rivers, and led the multitribal alliance that inflicted catastrophic defeats on American military expeditions during the early 1790s. Other historians have traced the history of those Miami people who later were removed to Kansas and Oklahoma, but this volume provides the first scholarly account of those Miamis who either remained in Indiana or returned to the state after first being removed to the West.

Stewart Rafert’s initial chapters survey the history of the Miami people during the colonial and early national periods and illustrate that the Miamis developed close political and economic ties to New France. The resulting intermarriage of French and Miami populations produced an influential Métis leadership that emerged in the early nineteenth century and has continued to dominate tribal affairs in Indiana. By the 1830s, Miami leaders such as Jean Baptiste Richardville and Francis Godfroy enjoyed considerable success as frontier businessmen but also represented the tribe in its dealings with the federal government. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the Miamis signed a series of treaties that relinquished most of their lands in Indiana and that provided for the removal of the tribe to Kansas. Yet these treaties also awarded individual tracts of land along the Wabash and Mississinewa rivers to prominent Métis and other leaders who were allowed to remain in Indiana. Most Miamis were removed, and after 1846 the federal government recognized only the tribal council and leaders of the removed or western Miamis as legitimate spokesmen for the tribe.

Rafert illustrates that in the two decades following removal many of the western Miamis returned to Indiana, where they sought refuge on the private lands awarded to those Miamis who had remained behind. Meanwhile, although the federal government refused to establish an Indian agency in Indiana, it continued to recognize the eastern Miamis as “Indians,” and they remained eligible for Bureau of Indian Affairs services. In addition, many of the Indiana Miamis protested the taxation of their lands by state and local governments, but ironically, in pursuing such exemptions, the Miamis ran afoul of Willis Van Devanter, a Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrat and a native of Indiana who arbitrarily declared in November 1897 that the Miamis were citizens of Indiana and no longer Indians.

Rafert discusses the declining economic position of the Miamis during the twentieth century and describes how tribal members maintained a sense of cohesion through family gatherings, cultural activities, and informal assemblages. He also traces Miami attempts to regain federal recognition in the twentieth century and cogently argues that the Miamis remain a tribal community, regardless of their lack of federal recognition.

Written for a general audience, Rafert’s volume is adequately documented and provides a valuable case study of the evolution of a modern Native American community. Moreover, his discussion of the Miami quest for federal recognition provides valuable insights into the fluid parameters of modern Native American identity.

R. David Edmunds, Indiana University, The Journal of American History, June 1997

“Many Hoosiers think of the Miami Indians as the losers in fights with frontier generals such as William Henry Harrison, although they won their share.

To others, they are who Miami County was named for.

But few think of the Miamis as a continuing presence in the Hoosier State—a tribe that has battled for its very cultural life and today enjoys a bit of a renaissance.

This is the focus of The Miami Indians of Indiana, by Stewart Rafert, a non-Miami who has become the semi-official chronicler of this state’s members of the tribe. He is a graduate of Earlham College in Richmond and a professor at the University of Delaware.

The book tries to cover all of the nearly 350 years of Miami presence in Indiana. Unlike many histories of the tribe, he doesn’t end with the forced removal of many Miami around 1840. He describes the village life of the ones who stayed on through the remainder of the 19^th century and into the 20^th. He also discusses at great length the tribe’s political dealings in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

If there is a theme to the book, beyond the history, it is the struggle of the Miami to retain their identity, even in the face of hostile governments, broken treaties, and the expropriation of tribal lands by nefarious whites.

The book’s subtitle, A Persistent People, says it all.

Rafert summarizes the Miami success when he writes: “Miami of the late twentieth century are clearly not culturally the same as the Miami first contacted by the French in 1654, nor are they culturally the Miami of the early nineteenth century. If they had persisted in the cultural characteristics of those periods, they would be extinct. Rather the Miami have found continuity and survival as a people through their ability to change.”

Later he writes: “Beginning in the 1960s they began a slow revitalization and began to look to the future. No longer a land-based, rural Indian group, they realized that an Indian heritage could be kept alive in a different context.

“In a way, they were freed from the land and a very narrow definition of being Indian. Now the Miami could look beyond their immediate past and painful memories to an enlarged view of their past and from that build a future.”

Rich Gotshall, Indianapolis Star, 7 July 1996

“The story of the Indiana Miami (officially the Miami Nation of Indians in the State of Indiana) is both timely and well told by Stewart Rafert in The Miami Indians of Indiana. His argument is that the Indiana Miami deserve federal recognition as a tribe. Indeed, much of his professional career has been spent working toward that goal. The fact that the goal has not yet been reached, even in the present favorable climate of public opinion and federal policy, lends particular poignancy to the telling of the story.

Rafert’s new book appropriately considers the history of all the Miami people from the beginning of historical contact in 1654, when they were living in Wisconsin, to the removal of many from Indiana in 1846. For the period after removal, Rafert’s attention centers almost exclusively on the remaining Indiana Miami. He highlights not only the social, cultural, and subsistence changes experienced by them, but also the persistence of older ways that have allowed them to avoid acculturation and have kept them Indian.

While their recent past has left some painful memories, the Miami Indians of Indiana have achieved a revitalization that few would have dreamed possible at the beginning of this century. With the help of Stewart Rafert and the Indiana Historical Society, they will celebrate their Miami-ness far into the future.

Phillip R. Shriver, Indiana Magazine of History, December 1996

“Rafert’s main area of interest in writing a tribal history of the Miami concerns the period following removal up to the present. His opening discussion of tribal history from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century succeeds in establishing a historical framework that allows the reader to have a deeper understanding of Miami culture. The author argues that the Miami continue to constitute a living community in Indiana.

The author has written an important contribution to the history of the Midwest. Too often the stories of unrecognized native peoples are ignored in the telling to the nation’s history. This book documents a tribe’s hope for acknowledgment and respect in a country that tried to take away their land, history, and culture. As Stewart Rafert points out in his title, the Miami are a persistent people who will continue their determined effort to gain federal status.”

Arthur J. Leighton, Purdue University, Michigan Historical Review, Fall 1996