The Coming Out Place

Abstract

The history of Indigenous people in Indiana is usually told as a story that begins in the late seventeenth century, with the arrival of French colonizers exploring regional lakes and rivers to secure territory, trade, and souls. This well-known narrative disregards over ten thousand years of Indiana’s past and overlooks the experiences of the first people who settled throughout the state. Ancestral Native Americans created communities and made use of Indiana’s abundance for millennia before the first Europeans claimed the region. How they lived, who they were, and the history they made are largely found in archaeological studies rarely included in historical narratives of Indiana. To better understand the history of Native Americans in Indiana, Dawn G. Marsh moves away from a narrative that begins with European colonization and extends the framework of the state’s history to the first peopling of the state. This study, based in both history and archaeology, offers a more holistic and balanced story of Indiana’s first people.