Our Relations...the Mixed Bloods: Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes

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. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction 1 Ojibwe Ethnogenesis and the Fur Trade Anishinaabewaki, or Great Lakes Indian Country Fur Trade Indigenizing Fur-Trade Interpretations A Mythopoetic Account of the Fur Trade 2 Descent Ideology, Sociality, and the Transformation of Indigenous Society Race, Indians, and Mixed Bloods 3 Ojibwe Treaties, the Emerging Paradigm of Race, and Allotting Mixed Bloods Ojibwe Land Cession Treaties Alienability of Land in Treaty Land Provisions for Mixed Bloods The Mixed-Blood Provisions in the Chippewa Treaties 4 “Mixed Bloods” in the Southwest Sector of Anishinaabewaki 5 Implementing the Mixed-Blood Provision of the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe First Efforts at Mining the Penokees Private Interests and the Locating of Mixed-Blood Lands in the Penokees Patenting the Mixed Bloods Plausible Deniability and the Dangers of Liminal Legal Status 6 Constituting Reservation Society on the Emerging Postdispossession Landscape Resource Extraction History Allotting and Logging the Reservations Constituting the Reservations 7 Allotment and the Problems of Belonging The St. Croix Chippewa Problem Chiefs and Headmen versus the Progressives Blackbird’s Memories and the Political Aspirations of the Full-Bloods Actual Marriage Patterns and the Decline of the Mixed-Blood/Full-Blood Distinction The Long-Term Legacy Conclusion Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index