"Our Relations…the Mixed Bloods"

Larry Nesper

Description

In the Great Lakes region of the nineteenth century, "mixed bloods" were a class of people living within changing indigenous communities. As such, they were considered in treaties signed between the tribal nations and the federal government. Larry Nesper focuses on the implementation and long-term effects of the mixed-blood provision of the 1854 treaty with the Chippewa of Wisconsin. That treaty not only ceded lands and created the Ojibwe Indian reservations in the region, it also entitled hundreds of "mixed-bloods belonging to the Chippewas of Lake Superior," as they appear in this treaty, to locate parcels of land in the ceded territories. However, quickly dispossessed of their entitlement, the treaty provision effectively capitalized the first mining companies in Wisconsin, initiating the period of non-renewable resource extraction that changed the demography, ecology, and potential future for the region for both natives and non-natives. With the influx of Euro-Americans onto these lands, conflicts over belonging and difference, as well as community leadership, proliferated on these new reservations well into the twentieth century. This book reveals the tensions between emergent racial ideology and the resilience of kinship that shaped the historical trajectory of regional tribal society to the present.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword

Introduction

1. Ojibwe Ethnogenesis and the Fur Trade

2. Descent Ideology, Sociality, and the Transformation of Indigenous Society

3. Ojibwe Treaties, the Emerging Paradigm of Race, and Allotting Mixed Bloods

4. "Mixed Bloods" in the Southwest Sector of Anishinaabewaki

5. Implementing the Mixed-Blood Provision of the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe

6. Constituting Reservation Society on the Emerging Postdispossession Landscape

7. Allotment and the Problems of Belonging

Conclusion

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• History of the Americas
• Indigenous peoples

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438482873
• Langue: English

Extrait

“OUR RELATIONS… THE MIXED BLOODS”
SUNY series, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building

Brian Hosmer and Larry Nesper, editors
“OUR RELATIONS… THE MIXED BLOODS”
INDIGENOUS TRANSFORMATION AND DISPOSSESSION IN THE WESTERN GREAT LAKES
LARRY NESPER
With research assistance from Amorin Mello
FOREWORD BY MIKE WIGGINS JR.
Chair of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians
Cover photo: Portrait of French Indians and Vincent Roy. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nesper, Larry, author. | Wiggins, Mike Jr., foreword.
Title: “Our relations … the mixed bloods” : indigenous transformation and dispossession in the western great lakes / Larry Nesper, foreword by Mike Wiggins, Jr., with research assistance from Amorin Mello.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438482859 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438482873 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For brother and sister, daughters, their spouses, nephews, and grandchildren
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
1 Ojibwe Ethnogenesis and the Fur Trade
2 Descent Ideology, Sociality, and the Transformation of Indigenous Society
3 Ojibwe Treaties, the Emerging Paradigm of Race, and Allotting Mixed Bloods
4 “Mixed Bloods” in the Southwest Sector of Anishinaabewaki
5 Implementing the Mixed-Blood Provision of the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe
6 Constituting Reservation Society on the Emerging Postdispossession Landscape
7 Allotment and the Problems of Belonging
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Figures 4.1 The frontispiece of Alfred Brunson’s leather-bound Letter Book . 5.1 Annotated list of LaPointe Iron Company’s corporate land holdings . 5.2 Mixed-blood Louis Nay waw goo’s patent to land in the Penokees . 7.1 Detail of a late-nineteenth century hand-drawn bird’s eye view of the town of Odanah on the Bad River Reservation .
Photographs 5.1 Julius Austrian . 5.2 Portrait of French Indians and Vincent Roy . 5.3 Studio portrait of geologist Charles Whittlesey dressed for a field trip . 6.1 Drawing of Vincent Roy, “Uncrowned King of the Chippewas.” 7.1 Chief James Blackbird . E.1 Cover photo of “Citizens Preserving the Penokee Hills Heritage” Facebook page .
Maps I.1 The allotments in the Penokees made by Amorin Mello and published in News from Indian Country , May 2013 issue . 1.1 Detail of “Landforms of the United States” Erwin Raisz, Fifth edition, 1957 . 3.1 Map of the Mineral Lands upon Lake Superior Ceded to the United States by the Treaty of 1842 with the Chippeway Indians . 5.1 Whittlesey’s map of the Penokee Range, 1860 . 6.1 Detail of map of the Milwaukee, Lake Shore, and Western Railroad, 1885 . 6.2 Detail of Gage E. Tarbell’s Gogebic Iron Range . C.1 Detail of cultural/historic sites of the Bad River Watershed .
Acknowledgments
This book was inspired by the archival, cartographic, and investigative journalistic work of Amorin Mello, who collaborated with Bret Deutscher and Leo Filipczak as independent researchers and residents of the Lake Superior Basin in exploring the nineteenth-century history of the Chequamegon Bay area. Amorin published a paper entitled “Wisconsin’s Government Presumes Adverse Impacts Necessary for Mining Jobs” on the Woods Person blog in May of 2012. 1 This paper was particularly important in my decision to explore this story in greater depth, and I have drawn upon his seminal work and the sources that he identified throughout the process of researching and writing. Amorin established the connection between the mixed-blood provision of the Treaty of 1854 and eighty-acre allotments in the Penokees. He then pointed the way to the questionable practices that were at the heart of the land transfer from mixed-blood tribal members to private interests. I was in regular contact with Amorin through the research phase of this project, and I am deeply grateful to him, especially for his cartographic and archival work identifying many primary documents that were critical for telling this story. It is in this sense that this work is written with his research assistance, though I am the sole author of the prose and fully responsible for it.
I also wish to acknowledge the following individuals for the different forms of assistance they provided in bringing this work to fruition. The leaders of Chippewa Federal in Wisconsin welcomed my exploration of this topic from the start, especially Chris McGeshick and Tom Maulson. Early on, Susan E. Gray shared a very capacious bibliography with me. Steve Kantrowitz, in the History Department, and Anatoly Khazanov, in the Anthropology Department, both at UW-Madison, encouraged me to pursue this topic, and I am grateful for their on-going support and interest. Jameson Sweet shared valuable historical documents on Dakota mixed bloods, and James McLurken offered excellent advice on archival records. John Broihahn, state archaeologist, made valuable suggestions about land use in the region. Grant Arndt created a venue for me to tell an early version of this story at Iowa State as did the Indigenous Law Students Association at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Several accomplished scholars working on Ojibwe and related peoples have been supportive throughout the research and writing process. Here I am thinking of Theresa Schenck, Rebecca Kugel, Jacqueline Peterson, Susan Sleeper-Smith, Jennifer Brown, Lucy Murphy, Cary Miller, Bruce White, Rand Valentine.
Other fellow academics, legal and tribal government professionals, and activists took an interest and had valuable advice. They are William Leslie Balan-Gaubert, Mindie Lazarus-Black, James Botsford, John Coleman, William Cronon, Kennan Ferguson, Ray Fogelson, Al Gedicks, Sandy Gokee, Greggory Jennings, Robert J. Miller, Richard Monette, Matthew Newell, Eric Olmanson, Sheree Petersen, Brian Pierson, Kathy Reilly, Jason Sanders, Morgan Smallwood, Kekek Jason Stark, Paul Stenzl, Terry Straus, and John Suval.
Mike Wiggins, Edith Leoso, Tony Corbine, and Patrick Mayotte of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians were generous with their time and their archival sources. Kim Bouchard and Marian Duffy at the Great Lakes Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Ashland were most helpful in procuring archival sources only available there. Lisa Marine at the Wisconsin Historical Society helped with the illustrations. The University of Wisconsin-Madison granted me a semester sabbatical, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities offered me the opportunity to research and write for a semester. I am grateful to Brian Hosmer, who read a rough version of the manuscript and suggested that we consider it for the Tribal Worlds series. Two anonymous reviewers endorsed this judgment, and I hope I have adequately responded to their generous and thoughtful critiques. And finally, my dear and indefatigable partner, the recently retired Professor Shiela Reaves of UW-Madison’s Life Sciences Communication Department, not only encouraged me all along but very generously read the entire manuscript aloud, line editing for clarity. I am forever grateful.

Amorin Mello, 2013. “Wisconsin’s Government Presumes Adverse Impacts Necessary for Mining, Jobs.” Woods Person: Thoughts and reports on what is happening in Wisconsin’s North Woods. http://woodsperson.blogspot.com/2013/05/wisconsins-government-presumes-adverse.html . Visited July 1, 2018.
Foreword
This book illuminates a time and a series of events that represent the very worst of government abdication of this nation’s federal-Indian trust responsibility. Telling this story will undo the darkness of amnesia that has shadowed Penokee mineral rights and, in turn, heighten Wisconsin tribes’ connectivity to our watershed home. It centerpunches, the need for trust responsibility and the Bad River tribal people’s inherent right to live on our land without poisons unleashed into our waters for corporate profit. This book’s historical account, like Benjamin Armstrong’s 1892 memoirs, will cement the story of the cataclysmic changes wrought upon our ancestors. This story of the Bad River tribe’s journey represents a key piece of evidence and truth that will help unlock the possibilities of water protection and life well into the future. In effect, this book helps us look backward to remember and to know. While moving forward, it also sends a call to action along the arc of truth and justice.
Larry Nesper is a trusted friend, mentor, and educator in my world. His book The Walleye War on Ojibwe Indian spearf