Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2012
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 32:3 (Summer 2012).
Abstract
The Great Plains is in the middle of everywhere. It has been crossed and recrossed for tens of thousands of years. Because of its central location, the region served as a historical laboratory where people were "forever imagining new environments and trying to muscle them into being."l In what is now the state of Nebraska-the very center of the middle-divergent groups of Native Americans claimed vast territories and created dynamic cultures. Among these peoples were the Omaha, who settled on the Missouri River, and the Pawnee, who lived in the Platte Valley. Four empires-Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United States-also forced their way into the Great Plains beginning in the sixteenth century. They saw the region as a geopolitical buffer zone and a potential source of wealth. Their worldviews of the region would have been very hard for the Omaha or the Pawnee to understand. While three of the empires claimed to own Nebraska, in reality, before the nineteenth century, it was Indian territory.
Comments
Copyright © 2012 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.