The third instalment of “history matters” focuses on a review of recently published books that cover some of the central topics discussed in We Remember: Stories about Ojibwe Child Welfare, a manuscript I submitted to a potential publisher. It seems my timing for seeking a publisher presents some unique challenges. Yet as universities are being forced to shut down the chance for new generations of students to learn about the incredible diversity of cultures in the nation and in the world, it feels even more important to share resources that may open up avenues for knowledge.
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Being from a mixed cultural ancestry, I’m not a stranger to feeling as though I was born to see things through different lenses. I often found myself in roles that required me to present those in power with perspectives that were different than theirs. Like a grain of sand that slipped into the mostly closed shell of an oyster, I entered the mostly impermeable systems of bureaucracies and universities. In this metaphor of life, I found that not all oysters (or mostly-closed systems) embrace the possibility of creating pearls by accepting the discomfort of finding common ground and creating inclusion for a broader network of connections. But for me, embracing differences has made life both uncomfortable and fascinating. I’ve had a chance to face the painful past and present and discover pearls of wisdom that might help us create a kinder future, like those contained in the following books.
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New Approaches for Re-viewing Native American History
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Overview – Understanding history and historical trauma is crucial for all of us, and perhaps especially so for Tribal community members as well as the many staff who are working with tribal children, families, and communities. However, I found that some of the community members and staff at the tribal, county, and state levels who participated in the We Remember… study knew very little about Native American history or issues. Reviewing the selected works that follow raises important questions about accessibility to necessary information that people in these positions need to know. While each of the following works makes extremely valuable contributions to the scholarly literature, it is hard to imagine many people outside of a college or university setting actually taking time to read and reflect on some of these important works.
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2012 – Brenda J. Child, a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe Tribe and a Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, has won many awards for her books about American Indian history. Her work, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community, provides important information about women’s contributions and leadership throughout history. [14] She also presents crucial information about family and child welfare issues, including a symbolically disturbing discussion of the destructive practice of placing Native American children in institutional “Indian” boarding schools.
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“The Indian Boarding School that opened at Mount Pleasant, Michigan, in 1893 was erected on sacred homelands, a place where the Anishinaabeg had for generations buried their dead.” [15]
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Boarding schools like Mount Pleasant remained the preferred placement for Native American children for the next fifty years and were among the many oppressive factors that affected the stability and self-sufficiency of tribal communities. [16]
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When the boarding school era ended by the 1940s, “the ‘adoption era’ for American Indian children” began.
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“Reservation hardships and urban poverty had placed a large burden on families; the largely white employees of social service agencies sought solutions to complex problems, including mental illness, alcoholism, and family violence, by removing children not only from the troubled parents but from the Indian community – permanently.” [17]
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She notes that the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978 to end this process by protecting “the interests of Indian families and tribal nations…” [18]
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2014 – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is an accomplished professor, scholar, writer, and social justice advocate who champions the rights of Indigenous peoples and women in her books and appearances. [19] Her widely acclaimed book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, presents a breathtaking panoramic view of history that exposes the foundational values and ideologies that undergirded and supported brutal colonial expansion and domination of Indigenous peoples in North America. [20] Dunbar-Ortiz argues,
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“Everything in US history is about the land – who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity (“real estate”) broken into pieces to be bought and sold on the market.” [21]
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The evidence she presents to support this thesis is powerful and compelling, and at times, the well-documented brutality and violence Indigenous people continued to experience is truly distressing and overwhelming. She notes that media and books often emphasize a “narrative of dysfunction” when discussing Native American issues which highlights their higher rates of poverty, alcoholism, and suicide and omits the long history of colonial oppression that led to and reproduces “Indigenous poverty and social scarring…” [22]
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2019 – Jeffrey Ostler is a professor in History and Native American Studies at the University of Oregon. [23] He has authored a number of books about tribal history in the United States. His recent book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, covers key events from the 1750s to 1860 for tribes in what is now the eastern half of the United States. [24] The purpose of Ostler’s book was to explore the effects of U.S. expansion for tribal nations in the eastern U.S., the level of destruction tribes experienced as a result, and the degree to which tribes were able to survive and recover.
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Ostler notes that the primary goal of the U.S. was to take the land from Indigenous inhabitants. There were three primary approaches considered: letting Natives die off from “natural” causes, begin an expensive long-term process to civilize and assimilate them, or remove them from their lands using force if need be. The U.S. chose the latter option and “unleashed a variety of destructive forces on Indian communities: war and violence, disease, material deprivation, starvation, and social stress.” [25] Ostler adds that some Indigenous people label this history “attempted genocide,” a perspective that should be taken seriously, but doing so, he points out, threatens the illusion most U.S. citizens have about “… the ultimate goodness of America.” [26]
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“To the extent that Americans identified specific causes for Native disappearance, they focused primarily on disease and alcohol and contended that inherent racial deficiencies made Indians vulnerable to these forces.” [27]
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2022 – Michael John Witgen, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, is a professor in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. [28] His recent book, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America, describes the “unthinkable” history of the United States from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. [29]
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“For European colonists and American settlers, …it was entirely conceivable that they had the right and power to claim ownership of an entire continent controlled by the Indigenous peoples of North America. Contemporary American citizens continue to find the idea that this continent already belonged to someone else to be an impossibility.” [30]
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Witgen focuses on describing the dispossession and plunder of Indigenous peoples in what was referred to as “the Northwest Territory” when the U.S. took control of land formerly claimed by the British. [31] He also describes how the Ojibwe People in the western Great Lakes region attempted to shape their own history. Intermarriage between influential Ojibwe women and key business and colonial leaders helped provide a protective buffer from war and land loss for a time, but also resulted in issues surrounding the children of mixed heritage marriages.
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Despite these efforts to buffer losses, his final assessment of colonial expansion is unapologetically honest.
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“The United States took shape through a political economy of plunder that pillaged Black lives and Indigenous land to institute a republic for white men. We live this history to this day.” [32]
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2023 – Ned Blackhawk, Western Shoshone, is a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. [33] His recent award-winning book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, presents a valuable and refreshing approach to address the absence of Native American struggles, losses, and contributions in most history texts in the U.S. [34] He begins the book with a crucial question and observation.
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“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy? This question haunts America, as it does other settler nations.” [35]
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Blackhawk interweaves the integral historical connections between the U.S. and Indigenous peoples throughout their five centuries of shared history in an ambitious epic meant to fill in all of the missing pieces. Of particular relevance in relation to We Remember… are the post Civil War years,
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“… the Reservation Era (1870s-1920s), when federal leaders such as U.S. Army captain Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and architect of its military-style pedagogy, sought to transform Native peoples by removing children from their families and destabilizing tribal governments.” [36]
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Blackhawk notes that removing children from their families became a cornerstone of federal Indian policies, placing children in institutional boarding schools far from their homes during the 1870s to the 1930s. In the 1950s, Native American children were targeted by a federal adoption program that placed them in white adoptive homes, and as “states gained increased jurisdiction over tribes,” states were also granted authority to remove Native children for placement with white families in foster and adoptive homes. [37]
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“Adoption, like termination and relocation, haunted reservations. It devastated Indian communities by taking away their most precious resource, their children.” [38]
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Although Blackhawk details these serious child welfare issues and continues his history through the end of the twentieth century, there is no mention of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Still, his work is a powerful contribution to the historical record in so many other respects.
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Synthesis – All of the works listed above detail the brutal colonial history Native American peoples experienced. As the authors point out, it is an important story that needs to be known by every citizen but has not been taught to many. The consequences for Tribes are obvious, yet they remain invisible to most people in the U.S. Although the authors all mention collective resistance at key points in history, most give little attention to the cultural strengths that helped tribal communities survive unimaginable violence, hardships, and loss. Child is a notable exception. She describes the crucial roles Ojibwe women played throughout history.
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“Women worked long and hard, but they could not counter all the effects of colonialism and federal policies that undermined Ojibwe sovereignty and community life… In every journey and story of survivance, women were at the heart of the Ojibwe sense of their world.” [39]
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She reminds us about the powerful lessons Native cultures have to teach all of us. Rupert Ross, a Euro-Canadian and Assistant Crown Attorney also shares his perspective on why it is so important to acknowledge Indigenous cultural strengths.
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“… if modern Canadians of European heritage were willing to grant, as their ancestors should have done two and three hundred years ago, that Native American Indian values and institutions are substantive, and have the potential to add to the well-being of this country, then not only would Canadians of European ancestry benefit but everyone would gain.” [40]
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A key state administrator who participated in the We Remember… study observed,
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“Some of the values that tribal communities have – environmental, family, community – our nation as a whole needs to be adopting and integrating. Despite all that they have had to endure, tribes are a treasure trove. They have maintained values that the whole society can adopt.” [41]
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This is a message woven throughout the ordinary lives of many people within the Ojibwe community who shared their stories in We Remember… Their resilience and survivance are as important to remember as the long history of violence and heartbreak their ancestors endured. [42]
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Notes
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[14] Brenda J. Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival Of Community (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), p. xxxvii. Her previous work also includes Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families,1900-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
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[15] Child, Holding Our World, 121.
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[16] Child, Holding Our World, 128.
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[17] Child, Holding Our World, 150-151.
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[18] Child, Holding Our World, 151.
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[19] Dunbar-Ortiz was born in Texas in 1938 and spent her childhood in Oklahoma. Her father was of Scots-Irish ancestry, but her lack of transparency about her mother’s ancestry resulted in controversy. See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxanne_Dunbar-Ortiz. Dunbar-Ortiz’s ancestry remains somewhat unclear. This is an important context given the focus of her research. After reading her book, I do not believe this biased her scholarship. If it had any effect at all, it may have added to her meticulous attention to accuracy and detail. One source reported that Dunbar-Ortiz claimed her mother’s ancestry was Cheyenne, which led to questions and controversy. She then admitted her mother was white, but changed it later to say her mother was Cherokee. America Meredith, “Issues & Commentary: Ethnic Fraud and Art,” Newsletter, Art in America, August 15, 2017. Retrieved from https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/columns/issues-commentary-ethnic-fraud-and-art-63285/.
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[20] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
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[21] Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous, 1.
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[22] Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous, 211.
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[23] Jeffrey Ostler – Professor of History Emeritus in History, IRES [U.S. National Science Foundation Award?], Native American Studies at the University of Oregon. See https://cas.uoregon.edu/directory/native-american-studies/all/jostler.
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[24] Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 2.
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[25] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 380.
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[26] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 380.
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[27] Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 378.
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[28] Michael Witgen’s work examines “… Indigenous and Early American history with a particular focus on the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi Valley. His publications include An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America, which was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in history, winner of the James A. Rawely Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the Coughey Prize from the Western History Association, and the state history prize from the Historical Society of Michigan.” Retrieved from https://history.columbia.edu/person/witgen-michael/.
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[29] Michael John Witgen, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Williamsburg & Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2022), 33.
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[30] Witgen, Seeing Red, 33-34.
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[31] The map of the “Northwest Territory” at the time included the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the parts of Minnesota and North Dakota east of the Mississippi River. Witgen, Seeing Red, 70.
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[32] Witgen, Seeing Red, 346.
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[33] Ned Blackhawk, Wikipedia, retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Blackhawk ; and Yale University, retrieved from https://history.yale.edu/people/ned-blackhawk.
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[34] Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).
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[35] Blackhawk, The Rediscovery, 1.
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[36] Blackhawk, The Rediscovery, 10.
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[37] Blackhawk, The Rediscovery, 429.
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[38] Blackhawk, The Rediscovery, 432.
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[39] Child, Holding Our World, xxvii.
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[40] Rupert Ross, Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Indian Reality (Markham: Octopus Publishing Group, 1992), ix.
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[41] Lance Smith, personal communication, as cited by Carol A. Hand, “We Remember: Stories about Ojibwe Child Welfare” (unpublished manuscript), Chapter Twenty-Three (October 29, 2001), 286-287.
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[42] The word “survivance” is something I discovered in the process of responding to this proposal requirement, although it was applied to Native Americans in 1999 by Gerald Vizenor. He explains,
“Survivance is an active presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.”
Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), vii. For more information, see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivance .
Voices from the Margins 