The Eagle Returns: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians
288
The Eagle Returns: The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians
288Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611860221 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
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THE EAGLE RETURNS
The Legal History of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa IndiansBy Matthew L. M. Fletcher
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2012 Matthew L. M. FletcherAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-022-1
Chapter One
The Story of the 1836 Treaty of Washington
Throughout the nineteenth century Anishinaabeg leaders from the Great Lakes, wearing eagle feather headdresses and elegantly beaded bandolier bags, met in treaty councils with U.S. commissioners. Trained for years as astute listeners and eloquent speakers, these diplomats put their skills to the test as they negotiated with their non-Indian counterparts, whose primary responsibility was to serve the interests of the federal government. The stakes were high, for Native territories and lifeways were often at risk.
The Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians is one of several Indian tribes who are signatories to the 1836 Treaty of Washington. These treaties brought together as a formal legal and political body the loose confederation of Indian communities or bands living in the Grand Traverse Bay region. In both treaties, the Grand Traverse Band people, represented by its leaders or ogemuk, sought to preserve a permanent tribal land base; reserve lake and inland hunting, fishing, and gathering rights; establish a government-to-government relationship with the United States; and acquire needed funds, materials, and services from the federal government.
The Three Fires Anishinaabek
Anishinaabek had lived in the Great Lakes area for hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans. The old stories say that the Anishinaabek came from the eastern seaboard, migrating upriver until they reached the massive inland seas. Vine Deloria Jr. recounted scholarship about four major groups of ancient people from the north and east—the Anishinaabek, the Dakota, the Salish, and pale-skinned people—and how they fought over many, many years until the pale-skinned people left the continent, perhaps as a result of an ice age. Andrew Blackbird wrote that spirits (Manitouwog) stole an Ottawa woman's baby and terrorized the Ottawas on the eastern seaboard, so that they moved away from the rising sun, toward the setting sun, and settled on Manitoulin Island.
The Three Fires—the Odawa (or Ottawa), the Ojibwe (or Chippewa or Ojibway), and the Bodewadmi (or Potawatomi)—had been linked together for centuries in Michigan and the western Great Lakes. Later, as they settled the Great Lakes area between 600 and 900 years ago, the Anishinaabek split into three major groups—the Odawa, the Ojibwe, and the Bodewadmi. Consistent with the importance of family to the Anishinaabek, the Ojibwe are often referred to as the "Elder Brother" in the confederacy, with the Odawa known as the "Next Elder Brother," and the Bodewadmi as the "Younger Brother." The Ottawa name likely derives from the word for "trader," and the Chippewa name from the kind of moccasins that Chippewa hunters wore; Potawatomi means "Keepers of the Fire." A nineteenth-century ogema (Anishinaabe leader or headman), Chamblee, explained their relationship in Michigan: "We Three nations—Chippewas, Pottawatomis, and Odawas—have but one council fire." These three nations are commonly referred to as the Three Fires.
The community now known collectively as the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians has occupied the Grand Traverse Bay region since as early as 1675, but Anishinaabe people and others have been living and hunting in Michigan for perhaps as long as 11,000 years. Back then, these Indian people appear to have hunted giant mammals, and fished the lakes and river using nets. Rock paintings recently discovered in the Grand Traverse Bay area demonstrate that Indian hunters armed with spears hunted the Michigan mastodon. These people may have been known by later Michigan indigenous peoples as the "Mammoth People." Other peoples included the Adena and Hopewell cultures.
Before the Treaties: Politics and Economics
Indian people in the Great Lakes region in the decades before the 1836 Treaty of Washington had already undergone centuries of change and conflict as a result of the European arrival in North America. Likely the first people that the Europeans encountered in the western Great Lakes region were the Ottawa, then living on and near Manitoulin Island and the Georgian Bay archipelago. Samuel de Champlain wrote the first European journal entry about his encounters with the Manitoulin Island Ottawas, who claimed to be picking blueberries, in 1615 or 1616. By this time, the Ottawas living on and around Manitoulin Island had been hunting seasonally in northern lower Michigan for hundreds of years.
In the seventeenth century, when the center of Ottawa culture was Manitoulin Island between Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay, the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy based in New York began military excursions into the western Great Lakes region, fighting the Huron Confederacy, Ottawas, Chippewas, Potawatomis, and dozens of other small Indian tribes in the region for a sixty-year period. In 1650, many Anishinaabe bands abandoned their homelands and relocated to the west, often around Green Bay, before they could return safely. In 1653, the Ottawas and Chippewas united to defeat the Haudenosaunees at Iroquois Point in the Upper Peninsula, allowing the Anishinaabek to reestablish their presence in the region. The conflicts with the Haudenosaunees did not conclude until the 1660s or 1670s. The reassertion of Anishinaabek authority in Michigan quickly followed this period. By 1671, the Odawak had formed a major trading center at Michilimackinac.
The end of the wars with the Haudenosaunees brought the arrival of the French fur traders and missionaries, creating major changes in the focus of the Anishinaabe economy. St. Ignace (Michilimackinac) and Sault Ste. Marie formed the major trading centers of the region. Anishinaabek traders also forged trading routes to the east as far as Montreal and other towns. According to Andrew Blackbird, Ottawa traders likely encountered French traders at Montreal, where they exchanged gifts, with the Ottawas bringing back to Mackinac firearms and axes. Since the Ottawas held the strongest remaining trade ties to the French, and since the Ottawas controlled the Straits of Mackinac, the Ottawas retained "a virtual monopoly over the profitable fur trade." In the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century, the French and the Ottawas became even closer trading partners, with many Frenchmen marrying into Ottawa families, learning to speak Anishinaabemowin, and adopting the custom of gift-giving. From 1671 to 1812, the Anishinaabek were wealthy and powerful. However, because the French government desired greater control over the fur trade, and because the population of French traders increased so greatly, the Ottawa monopoly over the fur trade eventually disappeared.
By the first part of the eighteenth century, a major cluster of Ottawa villages had formed near the Straits of Mackinac and, later, L'Arbre Croche and southward. In 1742, approximately 1,500 to 3,000 Ottawas lived there. It was in this period that Ottawa people settled on lands all down the coast of Lake Michigan, including the Grand Traverse Bay region. The French commander at Fort Michilimackinac wrote in 1741 of the "savages" at the Grand Traverse Bay who had made clearings for villages. These villages consisted of parallel rows of longhouses, called ktiganigamik, sixteen to twenty feet long and twelve to fourteen feet wide.
The Grand Traverse and Little Traverse communities have always been interconnected: the name in Anishinaabemowin for Little Traverse Bay is Wikwedongsing, and the name for Grand Traverse Bay is Kitchiwikwedongsing. Later, as the Christian missionaries entered the region, a split between the Catholic Indians and the traditional Indians formed, which also may have tracked the Catholic-Protestant divide between Little Traverse and Grand Traverse Anishinaabe communities. This split may have contributed to the decision of some families to choose to settle in Grand Traverse as opposed to Little Traverse, and vice versa.
Because of their close relationship with the French, these Odawa communities eventually took greater control of most of the Lower Peninsula, including the Grand River Valley and areas near and south of Detroit. Some Chippewa people moved toward the northeastern coast of the Lower Peninsula, with the Mackinac region acting as the dividing point.
At least two stories account for the presence of the Ojibwe bands in the Grand Traverse Bay area. One story, propounded by Andrew Blackbird, the famed Odawa historian, holds that the Grand Traverse Ottawas granted hunting rights to the Chippewas in compensation for the murder of a young Chippewa by an Ottawa during a fishing dispute at Mackinac. The other dates to an older period, when the Ottawas, with assistance from the Chippewas, drove the Mascouten people from the L'Arbre Croche region prior to settling there—the Ottawas then granting their Chippewa allies the right to live in the region. Regardless, the people of the two tribes (Ottawa and Chippewa) to this day retain their separateness, despite significant intermarriage. Richard White noted that the key element of difference between the two tribes in the region until the mid-nineteenth century was the greater emphasis by the Ottawas on agriculture. White also argued that the intermarriage between Ottawas and Chippewas at Grand Traverse Bay created a smooth assimilation of the Chippewas into the Ottawa community.
The latter half of the eighteenth century brought the arrival of the British and the Americans, with the French and Indian War driving out the French, Pontiac's War, and the American Revolutionary War. Despite these disruptions, the Michigan Anishinaabek economy, led by the northern Michigan Ottawas, diversified and even prospered.
Each European nation in the region—the French, followed by the British and then the Americans—had a different policy of dealing with Indian tribes in Michigan. It is fair to say that each one was progressively worse than the one before it. While the French often treated the Ottawas as equals, the British treated them as conquered peoples, even though the Ottawas had not been defeated in battle during the French and Indian War. After Pontiac's War, which involved a nearly successful confederacy of dozens of Indian military units, the British became more conciliatory toward the Indians. But the Americans, who pushed the British out of Michigan after the War of 1812 and took control of Michilimackinac in 1815, simply wanted all Indian lands. Moreover, any Indians or traders who sided with the British in the War of 1812 suffered the wrath and retribution of the Americans. In 1837, the State of Michigan became the final sovereign entity that entered Indian affairs.
Throughout all of this disruption, the Ottawa people were the most effective traders in the region. Michigan Ottawas engaged in trade over incredibly long distances, perhaps as far as 1,500 miles. For example, Henry Schoolcraft noticed an Indian pouch belonging to an Indian at Sault Ste. Marie that he recognized as originating at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean. In 1836, Baptist missionary Abel Bingham was surprised to see Michigan Anishinaabek relying upon wheat flour, tea, coffee, and sugar in the middle of winter, all goods imported from overseas.
The canoes built by the Michigan Anishinaabek were said to be "some of the best in America." These were the finest canoes in the northern hemisphere, capable of carrying over a ton of people and equipment for two-year treks, creating an ability to travel over all of the Great Lakes and their major tributaries. According to Gregory Dowd:
Men and women made them. The lighter, more elegant, and larger birch-bark canoes took two skilled people a full week to make; elm-bark canoes could be fashioned by two people in half a day. They contained in their making not only the birch or elm bark, collected late in the winter, but also white or red cedar or ash for the frame, sewn together with basswood fiber, elm root, spruce root, cedar root, pine root, or tamarack root, and sealed with a pitch of spruce, white pine, or balsam. Ottawas and Chippewas decorated their canoes with paint and dyes. By the nineteenth century, the canoes could be very large and carry more than a ton.
Contemporary European writers were astounded by the engineering of Anishinaabe canoes, and especially their carrying capacities:
Its length is thirty feet, and its breadth across the widest part, about four feet. It is about two and a half feet deep in the centre, but only about two feet near the bow and stern. Its bottom is rounded, and has no keel.
The materials of which this canoe is built, are birch bark, and red cedar, the whole fastened together with wattap and gum, without a nail, or bit of iron of any sort to confine the parts. The entire outside is bark—the bark of the birch tree—and where the edges join at the bottom, or along the sides, they are sewn with this wattap, and then along the line of the seam, it is gummed. Next to the bark are pieces of cedar, shaven thin, not thicker than the blade of a knife—these run horizontally, and are pressed against the bark by means of these ribs of cedar, which fit the shape of the canoe, bottom and sides, and coming up to the edges, are pointed, and let into a rim of cedar of about an inch and a half wide, and an inch thick, that forms the gunwale of the canoe, and to which, by means of the wattap, the bark and the ribs are all sewed; the wattap being wrapped over the gunwale, and passed through the bark and ribs. Across the canoe are bars, some five or six, that keep the canoe in shape....
But so light is it, and so easily damaged, that precautions are necessary to be taken in loading it, and these are attended to by placing round poles along the bottom. These, resting on the ribs, equally, for the whole length, cause the burden to press equally from one end to the other. Upon these the baggage rests, and also the crew and the passengers....
Our baggage and stores, and the provisions for the voyageurs, and our tents, &c., are estimated to weigh at least five hundred weight; and then there will be eleven of us ... who will not weigh short of fifteen hundred weight—so this canoe of bark is destined to carry not less than two thousand pounds! The paddles are of red cedar, and are very light. The blade is not over three inches wide, except the steersman's, that is, perhaps, five.
Henry Schoolcraft, who had become a powerful proponent of removal by the late 1830s, lamented that the ability of the Anishinaabek to construct canoes would all but guarantee that no federal plan to remove the Indians to the west would succeed.
And there are trails that Ottawa people from the Grand Traverse and Little Traverse Bays walked to trading centers in Saginaw, Detroit, Toledo, and Chicago. The Michigan Ottawas were situated between the Ojibwe communities in Canada and the Upper Peninsula, who had easy access to the Lake Superior fishery, with the Anishinaabe people in the Grand River and St. Joseph River Valleys, where Indians grew enormous quantities of corn, fruit, and other edibles. Ottawa people used their superior traveling capabilities and geographic advantages to act as the trading go-between for these nations. According to James McClurken, Ottawa families owned their own trade routes, which could be land-based or water-based. Families intermarried, on occasion, for the purposes of joining or expanding trade routes.
The Ottawa people in the northern Lower Peninsula also enjoyed a strong fishery both on the Great Lakes and inland, a plentiful berry harvest, and a significant crop of corn, beans, and squash—the Three Sisters. Andrew Blackbird wrote in the 1870s about his childhood: "Then I never knew my people to want for anything to eat or to wear, as we always had plenty of wild meat and plenty of fish, corn, vegetables, and wild fruits. I thought (and yet I may be mistaken) that my people were very happy in those days." Grand Traverse Bay area Anishinaabek also grew large gardens, sufficient to feed entire villages—even north, in shorter growing seasons than in the Grand River and St. Joseph River Valleys. On the importance of corn and agriculture, James McClurken wrote:
The Ottawa way of life was based on growing crops, fishing, and, to a lesser extent, gathering wild foods and hunting.... Most years, a successful corn crop yielded a surplus to be stored for leaner times ahead. The pattern of corn growing and method of land use were so central to their lives that when the Ottawa moved to Michigan's lower peninsula in the 1700s, they again sought lakeshore lands, settling in areas where the warmth of Lake Michigan's waters would aid them in the raising of their crops.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE EAGLE RETURNS by Matthew L. M. Fletcher Copyright © 2012 by Matthew L. M. Fletcher. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Chapter 1 The Story of the 1836 Treaty of Washington 2
Chapter 2 The Story of the 1855 Treaty of Detroit 34
Chapter 3 The Story of the Dispossession of the Grand Traverse Band Land Base 56
Chapter 4 The Story of the Federal Recognition of the Grand Traverse Band 84
Chapter 5 The Story of the Grand Traverse Band's Treaty Rights Fight 108
Chapter 6 The Story of the Development of Modern Tribal Law and Justice Systems 148
Chapter 7 The Story of the Grand Traverse Band's Gaming Operations 168
Afterword. Carried v. Salazar and the Band's Future Land Base 190
Notes 195
Bibliography 237
Index 249