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A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. By Gregory Evans Dowd. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. xxvi + 261 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-8018-4236-0.)
Within the past decade historians have reexamined the relationship between religious revitalization and intertribal political movements among the Indian tribes of the trans-Appalachian West. Richard White has asserted that attempts by the tribes to form pan-Indian tribal coalitions during this period were logical, if vestigial, patterns inherited from the French period, while Joel Martin and R. David Edmunds have argued that the coalitions were primarily religious in origin and assumed a political structure only as a secondary manifestation. In A Spirited Resistance, Gregory Evans Dowd reexamines the spiritual and political perspective of both northern and southern tribes and argues that attempts by Native Americans to form intertribal political movements during his period of study were spiritual movements, and that for leaders such as Tecumseh, religious and political motivation essentially were the same.