Between Past and Presence: Settler Masculine Imaginings and Settler and Indigenous Encounters in Detroit, 1871–1922

From the late 19^th century until the 1920s, white men of Detroit could only imagine Native Americans as savages and as performers. After the removal of Native peoples, or the placement under the panopticism of the reservation, Detroit settlers saw Native peoples through a settler masculine imagination, which led them to reimagine Detroit’s history as their own, excluding an Indigenous presence in the present. However, settler celebration of Detroit’s Indigenous past was limited due to the fact of their encounters with actual Indigenous peoples, including Hunkpapa Lakota Medicine Man Sitting Bill and the frequent Indigenous visitors--Walpole Anishinaabe (Odawa, Ojibwa, Pottawatomi) from the Walpole First Nations Reserve, approximately thirty miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Detroit. While trying to memorialize Detroit’s Indigenous past, settlers were confounded with the presence of actual Indigenous peoples. These encounters were not one way. Using newspaper accounts and reading against the grain, this paper examines the uneasy relationship between settler conceptions of Indigenous histories and peoples, and how that was preempted because of their encounters with Indigenous people.  Native peoples were making claim to Detroit, a space that had been their home for centuries. During these encounters, Native Americans asserted their presence, complicating settler imaginings about them.