OPENING REMARKS
by JOHN W. BENNETT
On behalf of the Ohio State
Archaeological and Historical
Society and the Ohio State University,
I want to welcome you all
to this first meeting of the
organization tentatively entitled "Ohio
Valley Historic Indian
Conference." Our discussions today will be
general rather than specific: a matter
of viewpoints and perspectives
of the three disciplines represented in
the meeting--archaeology,
ethnohistory, and history. We hope this
will be the introduction
to a series of annual meetings that may
do much to solve the
problems of Indian occupation and
relations with Caucasians in
the early historic period of the Ohio
Valley.
I need not tell you why we all feel
this is an important task.
A decade ago the Ohio Valley was
believed to be the key geo-
graphical area in the great Indian
movements of the protohistoric
period. The subsequent historical loci
of the Iroquois, the Shawnee,
the Delaware, and Siouan peoples and
other tribal groups were
viewed as end products of a process
that began in, or at least in-
volved, the Ohio Valley. It was assumed
that archaeological exca-
vation and documentary study would
subsequently establish these
presumptions as fact. As a graduate
student at the University of
Chicago I can recall long and confident
discussions of the great
Siouan traverse of the valley, and its
meaning for the subsequent
Indian history of the prairies and
plains.
Few or none of these old hypotheses
have been verified. The Ohio
Valley has become the great blind spot
of the East, and its
monotonous representation as
"uninhabited territory" on maps of
the early historic period attests to
the failure to find the evidence
so confidently anticipated a decade or
so ago. Perhaps that evidence
is simply not in existence. Whether
present or absent, it is evident
that very little work has been
accomplished by any of the con-
cerned disciplines. The recent world
war prevented and obscured
efforts begun in Chicago and elsewhere;
the shift of interest in
academic history from fact-gathering to
functional analysis, and a
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similar refocussing of the major
problems of ethnological research,
have not stimulated the recruitment of
younger scholars preoccupied
with the facts of early Indian history.
It is indeed encouraging to
find that interest is once more
aroused, and that this group can
gather here today in an effort to begin
serious work on the problem.
This morning the anthropological
disciplines will view the prob-
lem. Glenn Black, of Indiana
University, will begin with a dis-
cussion of the archaeological
perspective on the problem of historical
reconstruction of the Indian period.
Mr. Black needs little intro-
duction: he is the excavator of the
Angel site, one of the two
largest Mississippi culture towns in
the lower Ohio Valley, and
has taught archaeology at Indiana for a
number of years. The
second speaker, Mrs. Voegelin, also
from Indiana University,
has had a distinguished career as a
folklorist and ethnohistorian
of the region, and is currently
directing a study of Indian land
claims for the United States Department
of Justice.