Session Abstract

This panel is in dialogue with recent scholarship in American Indian and First Nations history that has argued against the view of the 19th century as a period of indigenous defeat and disappearance. In line with those studies, this panel emphasizes Indigenous peoples as co-constructors of modernity. Focusing on the Great Lakes borderlands, these papers consider the movement and presence of Anishinaabe peoples—Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi—in the 19th and 20th centuries. While some Anishinaabeg in the United States were forcibly removed west, many avoided removal through alliances with missionaries and traders, threats to migrate to Canada (as well as actual migration to Canada), land purchases, as well as claims to citizenship and place between settler states, Canada and the United States, and their respective Indigenous nations.

These papers, covering nearly 100 years, demonstrate Anishinaabe peoples’ constant negotiations of status and rights as they contended with settler encroachment, as well as Euro-American conceptions and (mis)representations of Indian identity and the regions’ history. In spaces that would become part of Michigan and Ontario, the presence of the Anishinaabeg as Civil War veterans, visitors to Detroit, and political actors actively fighting for belonging and citizenship, complicated Euro-American imaginings of Indians as outside of modernity. Even as Native peoples contested these depictions, some Anishinaabeg used Euro-American portrayals and strongly held beliefs about Native peoples to make claims to Federal and other resources. Others drew attention to their history to claim annuities. These papers use a variety of archival sources and ethnohistorical methods to tease out Anishinaabeg views of their identity, their history, and their continued presence that disrupted settler imaginings of the Great Lakes borderlands as a non-indigenous space.