Blackbird's Song: Andrew J. Blackbird and the Odawa People

by Theodore J. Karamanski

Overview

For much of U.S. history, the story of native people has been written by historians and anthropologists relying on the often biased accounts of European-American observers. Though we have become well acquainted with war chiefs like Pontiac and Crazy Horse, it has been at the expense of better knowing civic-minded intellectuals like Andrew J. Blackbird, who sought in 1887 to give a voice to his people through his landmark book History of the Ottawa and Chippewa People. Blackbird chronicled the numerous ways in which these Great Lakes people fought to retain their land and culture, first with military resistance and later by claiming the tools of citizenship. This stirring account reflects on the lived experience of the Odawa people and the work of one of their greatest advocates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611865035
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2024
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	322
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Theodore J. Karamanski is Professor of History and Director of the Public History Graduate Program at Loyola University Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

BLACKBIRD'S SONG

Andrew J. Blackbird and the Odawa People

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By Theodore J. Karamanski

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2012 Theodore J. Karamanski
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-050-4

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Chapter One

A Forest Youth

A SON IS BORN TO MACKADEPENESSY

Before he was born, before he was even conceived, the soul of Andrew Blackbird had been placed by the Great Manitou in his mother's womb. In a dome-shaped wigwam the body and the soul became one when his mother, kneeling on a mat of woven reeds, her arms clutching the smooth wooden pole of the delivery rack, pushed the infant boy out into the world. The women attending the birth took the baby and washed him in a murky bath of hot water, herbs, and ash. With relief the weary mother looked at the well-formed baby boy bawling over his unceremonious entrance into the world. For months both she and her husband had tried to avoid the sight of any deformed people or animals for fear of transmitting an abnormality to their child. She smiled with pride on the healthy child that would join his six brothers and four sisters as the newest member of the family. He was given the name Penesswiquaam, which can be roughly translated to mean Big Bird.

Like most Indians of his time and place Andrew Blackbird never knew the exact year of his birth. In 1884 he told the compilers of a commercial biographical and local history volume that he was "born south of the Traverse Region about 1820." Sixteen years later in one of his own writings Blackbird wrote, "The first remembrance I have of seeing a white man is more than 80 years ago, or soon after the war of 1812." How soon after 1815 this encounter was Blackbird could not be certain. He confessed in 1900, "I don't know just how old I am, as my parents did not remember." The best approximation of when he was born that can be obtained is his own estimate of "about 1820."

Andrew Blackbird was born and spent the first months of his life in the thick forests of the upper Muskegon River valley. Every day his father and brothers took their guns and set out in pursuit of game. Beaver and raccoon were hunted for their furs; deer, elk, and bear for their meat. Andrew's mother and sisters were kept perpetually busy by the laborious process of scrapping and drying the hide of furs destined for trade. At night in the wigwam Mackadepenessy and his older sons, while puffing on pipes, recounted their success and failures in the day's hunt. Their accounts of tracking deer through the winter forest or of treeing raccoons, told amid the blue haze of wood smoke and the glow of campfire, were the boy's first lessons on what was expected of him as a man.

Hunting camp stories also taught the boy to be proud of his lineage. The men of the Blackbird family were unique among the Ottawa in that they were said to descend from a people known as the "Undergrounds." Generations before they had come to the tribe as prisoners captured by far-ranging war parties. Their name came from "their habitations in the ground" and they likely were Panis, Indian slaves found among most Great Lakes Indian peoples. The name derived from the French term for the plains-dwelling Pawnee Indians, who did live in earth lodges. By Andrew's time the "Undergrounds," through merit and intermarriage with their captors, were in his words "the best counselors, best chieftains, and best warriors among the Ottawa."

Late in life when Andrew Blackbird wrote his history he took pains to present his family as "closely connected with the royal families" of the Ottawa. His mother's brother was the famed warrior Shaubena, an Ottawa who had married into the Illinois Potawatomi, and rose to a position of eminence. During the War of 1812, Shaubena was a strong supporter of Tecumseh's Indian alliance and he fought alongside the Shawnee leader until the latter's death at the Battle of the Thames. Thereafter, Shaubena became an advocate of peaceful coexistence with the United States, and in 1832 he won praise from white settlers for keeping the Potawatomi from joining Black Hawk's tragic "war." On his father's side was Ningegon, known to the Americans as Wing, the leading chief of the Mackinac Straits Ottawa. Wing earned the trust and friendship of the Americans for his anti-British position during the War of 1812. Pungowish, Andrew's great-grandfather, first brought the family to northern Michigan from the Detroit area. Pungowish in short order became an important leader among the Ottawa of the Straits region and according to family tradition he played a key role in obtaining Ottawa and Chippewa approval for the British to build a fort on Mackinac Island.

HUNTING CAMP DAYS

To appreciate the changes embraced by the Ottawa during his lifetime, it is useful to review in detail how Andrew Blackbird spent his early life. For at least the first eight years of Blackbird's life the family returned each winter to the Upper Muskegon country. Here was the family's designated and exclusive winter hunting and trapping ground. Large mammals such as deer, elk, and bear were hunted for food for the family and to trade at Mackinac Island. Fur-bearing animals were also trapped for trade. Commercial hunting provided the Ottawa with the ability to purchase firearms and other manufactured items, the most important of which were cotton and wool cloth. The winter hunting camp was one phase of a seasonal subsistence cycle that was adapted to exploiting widely separated ecological niches. While most European-Americans lived rooted on a family farm or village shop, the Ottawa lived mobile lives, sometimes working as farmers, fishermen, hunters, trappers, or craftsmen as the season dictated.

The subsistence round began each year at the end of August, when most families would leave the great summer village near Little Traverse Bay and canoe down the east shore of Lake Michigan. As Andrew later recorded:

In navigating Lake Michigan they used long bark canoes in which they carried their whole families and enough provisions to last them all winter. These canoes were made very light, out of white birch bark, and with a fair wind they could skip very lightly on the waters, going very fast, and could stand a very heavy sea. In one day they could sail quite a long distance along the coast of Lake Michigan. When night overtook them they would land and make wigwams with light poles of cedar which they always carried in their canoes. These wigwams were covered with mats made for that purpose out of prepared marsh reeds or flags sewed together, which made very good shelter from rain and wind, and were very warm after making fires inside of them.... After breakfast in the morning they are off again in the big canoes.

From early fall until the long winter was over, the family would hunt in the interior, isolated from other Ottawa.

As the snow began to melt, Andrew's father, Chief Mackadepenessy, directed the family to decamp for their sugar bush. There at a fine stand of maple trees Blackbird's family set to work tapping the sweet sap and processing it into granulized sugar. This was happy work. The isolation of the winter was replaced with the conviviality of the sugar camp, where many families would come together for several weeks and cooperate in a festive atmosphere. Sugar was the Ottawa's principle condiment and they used it as freely as the European-Americans employed salt. It was also a lucrative trade item, valued by the Mackinac traders desperate for bit of sweetness on the frontier.

When the last makuks of sugar were loaded onto their canoes, it was time to once more head for the shore of Lake Michigan. In his History Blackbird wrote:

Early in the spring we used to come down this beautiful stream of water (Muskegon River) in our long bark canoes, loaded with sugar, furs, deer skins, prepared venison for summer use, bear's oil, and bear meat prepared in oil, deer tallow, and sometimes a lot of honey, etc. On reaching the mouth of this river we halted for five or six days, when all the other Indians gathered, as was customary, expressly to feast for the dead. All the Indians and children used to go around among the camps and salute one another with the words, "Nebaw-baw-tche-baw-yew," that is to say, "I am or we are going around as spirits," feasting and throwing food into the fire—as they believe the spirits of the dead take the victuals and eat as they are consumed in the fire.

The feast would take place at a traditional burial ground where family members who had perished during the winter would be formally laid to rest and the memories of long-departed loved ones would be celebrated.

After the Feast of the Dead, all the Ottawa who had wintered in the Muskegon basin would form a flotilla of canoes and paddle back up the Michigan shore. After many days hard travel, the canoes, by tradition, stopped at Big Rock Point, the entrance to Little Traverse Bay. Here the lead canoes were honor bound to wait for the slower paddlers, so they could all arrive home together. When the canoes were halfway across the bay some of the men would hold their guns close to the water and fire, sending the sound to shore to alert the village folks. As the lodges came into sight the young men strained at their paddles, digging deep powerful strokes into the cold water to propel their canoe ahead of their friends and rivals. The bow of each canoe surged through the waves as moment by moment home gradually loomed closer and closer. Finally, through the clear water they could make out the lake bottom of stone and sand, which as the canoe glided forward, seemed to be rising up to meet them. Arms aching, the paddlers rested their blades on the gunnels of the craft and glided up to the beach, where the sweet sound of sand on the bow told them they were home.

Chief Mackadepenessy led his family to their wigwam in the village. This was a large dwelling, "sixty or seventy feet long" and twenty-five feet wide, that would be used by the family year after year. The frame was made of wooden poles secured in the ground and bent to form a domed roof. Overlapping sheets of bark clad the structure and ensured, according to a French observer, that "no rain whatever gets into them." Andrew lived in his father's wigwam with his brothers, sisters, and possibly with one of his uncles and his family. "I distinctly remember the time," he wrote in his history, "and I have seen my brothers and myself dancing around the fires in our great wigwam, which had two fireplaces inside it." The flickering light cast their large shadows on the wigwam walls as before the blazing fire the boys performed "grand medicine dances." The rhythmic drumbeat and the cantabile chorus of voices rose up with whiffs of smoke through the chimney hole, where it joined with the sounds of celebration rising from hundreds of similar lodges spread out on the dark shore of the inland sea.

LAND OF THE CROOKED TREE

L'Arbre Croche had been the grand village of the Ottawa since 1742. To the Ottawa the village was known as Waganagisi, taking its name from a tall, crooked pine tree that overhung a high lakeshore bluff. However, it was the French name for the land of the crooked tree that became best known, L'Arbre Croche. In time the term referred to not simply a single collection of wigwams but the dense concentration of Ottawa families along the entire shore of Little Traverse Bay.

"In my first recollection of the country of Arbor Croche," Andrew Blackbird wrote in his history, "there was nothing but small shrubbery here and there in small patches, such as wild cherry trees, but the most of it was a grassy plain; and such an abundance of wild strawberries, raspberries and blackberries that they fairly perfumed the air of the whole coast with [the] fragrant scent of ripe fruit." Andrew, like the other boys, had free run of the village area. Some days they played ball games; others were devoted to footraces, wrestling, and frequently hunting squirrels and chipmunks with their little bows and arrows. The boys also learned to set nets for fish in the clear waters of Little Traverse Bay. Gill nets made from twine purchased from fur traders were set in the bay by means of sinker stones tied to the bottom and wooded floats attached to the top. Andrew would set his nets in the evening. When the boy returned in the morning, he remembered, "Your net would be so loaded with delicious whitefish as to fairly float."

Blackbird's memory of his youth at L'Arbre Croche was clearly tinted by nostalgia. Writing in old age he recalled,

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, at least I was as happy myself as a lark.

Summer generally was a time of plenty for the Ottawa. Nor did Blackbird overstate the abundance of resources offered by the Little Traverse area during that beautiful yet brief time of year. It was very much an ideal setting for a young boy with a bow, a landscape of beaches and forests to explore, and a cohort of friends to do it with.

The sights and sounds of those long summer days at old L'Arbre Croche stayed with Andrew Blackbird and became for him a refuge, a place to which he could retreat in snug security during the years ahead. He took particular comfort in the memory of a small bird, a brown thrush.

Early in the morning as the sun peeped from the east, as I would yet be lying close to my mother's bosom, this brown thrush would begin his warbling songs perched upon the uppermost branches of the basswood tree that stood close to our lodge. I would then say to myself, as I listened to him, "here comes again my little orator," and I used to try and understand what he had to say; and sometimes thought I could understand some of its utterances as follows: "Good morning, good morning! Arise, arise! shoot, shoot! Come along, come along!" etc., every word repeated twice. Even then, and so young as I was, I used to think that little bird had a language which God or the Great Spirit had given him, and every bird of the forest understood what he had to say, and that he was appointed to preach to other birds, to tell them to be happy, to be thankful for the blessings they enjoy among the summer green branches of the forest, and the plenty of wild fruits to eat.

It was common for an Ottawa man to have a special relationship with an animal who has blessed him. It is likely that throughout his life Blackbird listened for the sound of the brown thrush's song and that its warbling soothed him by opening a window on a happy time of his life.

The beauty and plenty of L'Arbre Croche masked a history of tragedy and death that haunted the landscape. In his history, Andrew Blackbird later recounted how in times past a smallpox epidemic had killed much of the village's original and larger population. It may have been a story he was told in his youth, though it is likely one he embellished with his own details.

The Ottawas were greatly reduced in numbers from what they were in former times, on account of the smallpox which they brought from Montreal during the French war with Great Britain. This small-pox was sold to them shut up in a tin box, with the strict injunction not to open the box on their way homeward, but only when they should reach their country; and that this box contained something that would do them great good, and their people! The foolish people believed really there was something in the box supernatural, that would do them great good. Accordingly, after they reached home they opened the box; but behold there was another tin box inside, smaller. They took it out and opened the second box, and behold, still there was another box inside of the second box, smaller yet. So they kept on this way till they came to a very small box, which was not more than an inch long; and when they opened the last one they found nothing but moldy particles in this last box! They wondered very much what it was, and a great many closely inspected to try to find out what it meant. But alas, alas! Pretty soon burst out a terrible sickness among them. The great Indian doctors themselves were taken sick and died. The tradition says it was indeed awful and terrible. Every one taken with it was sure to die. Lodge after lodge was totally vacated—nothing but the dead bodies lying here and there in their lodges—entire families being swept off with the ravages of this terrible disease. The whole coast of Arbor Croche, or Waw-gaw-naw-ke-zee, ... was entirely depopulated and laid waste.

According to the story, the blame for this disaster lay with "the British people" who acted out of "hatred" to "kill off the Ottawas and Chippewas because they were friends of the French Government or French King, whom they called 'Their Great Father.'"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from BLACKBIRD'S SONG by Theodore J. Karamanski Copyright © 2012 by Theodore J. Karamanski. 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.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

1 A Forest Youth 1

2 The Crisis 23

3 A New World 77

4 We Now Wish to Become Men 109

5 Citizen Blackbird 145

6 Doing Good amongst My People 167

7 Light and Shadows 209

Epilogue 235

Notes 241

Bibliography 275

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

This is so much more than a singular biography. In Blackbird’s Song, Karamanski has crafted a detailed and readable narrative of person, time, and place. This is how history should be written—with color, passion, and personality.

—Anthony G. Gulig, Chair, Department of History, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater

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