Many children in North America aren’t aware of the importance of rivers in their community. This book lets kids see how indigenous peoples rely on the river as their source of life.

Seventeenth-century Indians from the Delaware and lower Hudson valleys organized their lives around small-scale groupings of kin and communities. Living through epidemics, warfare, economic change, and physical dispossession, survivors from these peoples came together in new locations, especially the eighteenth-century Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys. In the process, they did not abandon kin and community orientations, but they increasingly defined a role for themselves as Delaware Indians in early American society. Peoples of the River Valleys offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley. It focuses on a broad and significant period: 1609-1783, including the years of Dutch, Swedish, and English colonization and the American Revolution. An epilogue takes the Delawares' story into the mid-nineteenth century. Amy C. Schutt examines important themes in Native American history—mediation and alliance formation—and shows their crucial role in the development of the Delawares as a people. She goes beyond familiar questions about Indian-European relations and examines how Indian-Indian associations were a major factor in the history of the Delawares. Drawing extensively upon primary sources, including treaty minutes, deeds, and Moravian mission records, Schutt reveals that Delawares approached alliances as a tool for survival at a time when Euro-Americans were encroaching on Native lands. As relations with colonists were frequently troubled, Delawares often turned instead to form alliances with other Delawares and non-Delaware Indians with whom they shared territories and resources. In vivid detail, Peoples of the River Valleys shows the link between the Delawares' approaches to land and the relationships they constructed on the land.

Sometimes people leave their home with the hopes of finding something better. Sometimes they are forced out and chased away. Philip Eamer and his wife, Catrina, experience both in this true story of immigrants searching for a place to call home. The Eamer family’s story begins in 1755 as they leave the Rhine Valley for a better life in America. Once there, they move to the Mohawk River Valley in New York, where they build a home and raise 10 children. Despite the effects of the French Indian War, the Eamers flourish and happily find their lives intertwined with their neighbours and fellow immigrants for almost two decades. However, no family’s story occurs in isolation, and eventually the Eamers find themselves at the mercy of the political and historic events of the American Revolution. Choosing to side with the Crown, they are forced to flee their home at the hands of neighbours and soldiers. What follows next is representative of many Loyalists’ experiences. The Eamer family is forced to make a 370-km (230-mile) trek to Montreal, where they must live in a refugee camp for three years before finally being granted their own land in the St. Lawrence Valley for their loyalty to the King. Told by one of Philip and Catrina’s descendants, Three River Valleys Called Home is historical fiction based on a real family and true events. Although some of the interactions and dialogue may be imagined, they are firmly planted in the harsh realities that many immigrants faced and pay tribute to the true grit of the settlers who built North America. While this book will have special meaning for the thousands of descendants of the Eamer family (and the other families who made up their community), their story will touch anyone with a history of immigration in their family tree.

Daily life among the Indians of the Chattahoochee River Valley.

A look at the geography, history, economy, language, social classes, villages and cities, religion, culture, and inventions of the ancient Indus River Valley.