Ecotone History

Now Available:

People of the Ecotone
Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America
Robert Michael Morrissey
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

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.

University of Washington Press/ Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

Please contact me if you would like me to speak to your group about my new book.

Upcoming

Lecture/ Webinar for  Sinsinawa Mound Retreat Center, November 2023 (TBA).

Environmental Studies of the Great Lakes Conference (postponed)

Stories and News Releases:

https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/49387165

I am a historian who writes and teaches about the history of early America, American frontiers, and environmental history.  In 2018-2020, I was Mellon Faculty Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, where I led an interdisciplinary team in programming, research, and curriculum development. Click here for our group study, The Flatland Project, including my essay “The Drains out of Town.”

I also helped to create the Colonial American History Lecture Series at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which is now in its sixth year.

I am founding co-editor of the book series, Environmental Studies of the Great Lakes, a new interdisciplinary series from Michigan State University Press. I am also a member of the Reclaiming Stories collaborative project team.

In teaching, I am working on collections-based teaching, guiding student research, and community engagement. My course on Colonial American history now features a major project on one special object in the UIUC collections; check out the online exhibit here or watch this short mini-documentary. In Spring 2024, I will lead a Humanities Research Lab on local environmental history.

My new project is an environmental history of agricultural drainage in the former tallgrass prairie region of North America– the “corn belt.” A somewhat unsung and perhaps unlikely topic for a history book, ag drainage (burying “tiles” in fields) was and is a massive feat of engineering, representing as consequential a change in the wetland environments of the Midwest as more recognizable water engineering—dams and irrigation projects—ever made in the arid West. It is a primary component of one of the biggest environmental problems in North America today—nitrogen and phosphorus pollution from agricultural runoff in downstream bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico and Great Lakes. I am planning a new book that centers this often invisible engineering project as the key event in Midwestern environmental history.

For an initial foray into this topic, see my essay, “The Drains out of Town.”