Thanks to having mono,
I was able to finish up a map idea I've had kicking around in my head for a while now. Basically, thanks to a less united USA, featuring states that secede and re-enter whenever they damn well please, (not great for a country's stability or growth, for the record...) an alternate version of Tecumseh was able to put together a solid native resistance that kicked out the Americans from his Confederacy's lands.
History happens and *Tecumseh's confederacy has reformed into a semi-federal Tribal Republic. Rather than federating by locality, power is diffused among the different tribes. Each tribe has it's own procedure for determining who's in and who's out, but by the time the map takes place, lineage is usually what determines who's a citizen of which tribe. Whites without any native ancestry have their own "tribe" within the republic, but due to how stringent the immigration requirements are, there aren't a lot of pure white folks living in Indiana. Local affairs and other odds and ends that a tribal government can't deal with are handled by municipal governments, which makes mayors and town chiefs much more powerful than their counterparts in other countries. Most people, about 85% of the population are, at the very least, partially of Native descent[1] Each tribe maintains their own language, but the dominant language of government and business is Algonquonian, a creole/constructed language that combines Miami-Illinois, Shawnee, Sauk-Fox, Lenape, and Iroquois. There is much hand wringing amongst the oldsters about "kids these days only knowing Algonquonian and only barely being able to read their own language"[2]
Indiana would seem slightly xenophobic and paranoid to anyone from OTL. They only recently ratified the New Orleans Accords, joining the International Mississippi Commission. Given Indiana's history of defensive conflict and racism from her neighbors, much of that paranoia is justified. However, those times are a changin' and many young Indianans are more accepting of outsiders than their parents and grandparents. So who knows what the future will hold for Indiana?
[1] Up until Indiana was able to strong arm all her neighbors into understanding that squatting whites were not allowed to settle within her borders, there were quite a few whites who snuck in and set up shop anyway. Many of them have assimilated and intermarried with the Natives over the years, so most members of the White Tribe are descended from recent immigrants, mostly from Europe directly.
[2]
