Reviewed by Barbara Tsatsoulis-Bonnekessen
BARBARA@UKANVAX.BITNET
Adj. Assist. Professor, Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology,
Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas.
Submitted: Wed, 24 Aug 1994 19:10:19 -0500 (CDT)
The literature dealing with the Dawes Act, subsequent legislations, and their catastrophic consequences for the inhabitants of Indian Country is well served with this newest addition. The author's recounting of this part of the history of the Anishinaabe effectively lifts the reservation members out of the state of perpetual victimization in which indigenous people often find themselves described, and sketches a convincing picture of a people responding to the pressures of a changing world, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
The book is divided into four chapters, each starting with a brief preview of its contents and ending with a summary, a strategy serving those who might just wish to browse the volume. The first chapter, "Anishinaabe Migrations and the Genesis of White Earth Communities" conducts a survey of pre- and on-reservation population movements, settlement patterns, ethnographic descriptions, and policies enacted by inside as well as outside (i.e., US government) agencies. Both of the later protagonists are introduced objectively, the metis, originating from marriages between fur traders and native women, and the Anishinaabeg, developing a sense of community by settling on White Earth. Their origins and early cooperation are traced with only a hint of the later conflict expressed in the groups' settlement patterns and professions. The detail seems confusing at times, for example, the names of individual actors in Anishinaabe history should be presented in a genealogical figure where the reader might refresh her memory as to who is related to whom, where they are located, and at what time they were sociopolitically active. Without such a visual summary, this reader was tempted to draw genealogies alongside, just to keep track of individuals. While the book is an excellent example of presenting indigenous actors as individuals, the lack of such a summary detracts from this advantage(footnote 1). Other than that, this chapter is a concise history of the Anishinaabe 19th century history and could well stand on its own.
The second chapter, "Signatures and Thumbprints: Community and Ethnicity at White Earth", draws a point-by-point comparison between the metis and the conservative Anishinaabe. Surprisingly, because there seem to be no interceding individuals, all metis are described as cash-crop farmers and merchant-traders, residing in the agriculturally suitable western part of White Earth, using wage employment, public schools, English-language Catholic churches, and anglicized surnames. They show a strong out-reservation orientation and even stronger adherence to market values, such as the individual accumulation of wealth. The conservative Anishinaabeg are described in terms of opposites; subsistence horticulturists or gatherers/hunters, located in the eastern part of White Earth, suitable to a comfortable exploitation of the seasonal round, using only sporadic wage employment and public schools, both as the seasonal industry allowed for. This group participated in Episcopalian English- and Anishinaabe-language churches as well as in the Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society, used Anishinaabe surnames, and showed a political orientation focused on kindred and band, where individuals were content once they had achieved a comfortable level of subsistence farming.
As Meyer points out, this reservation-wide division between metis and Anishinaabeg allowed the former to indulge in the market-economy of the US, provide consumer items and loans for reservation residents, and act as cultural brokers for the conservatives who were thus buffered to pursue their traditional lifestyle best suited to them and their environment. The only two times these two groups met were during the annuity payment, where, maybe typically, the metis merchant-traders could be observed waiting for those who received payment to collect outstanding debts or to induce them to trivially spending it; the June 14 Celebration of White Earth's creation in 1867 truly brought both groups together in a pageant which ostensibly celebrated the transformation and assimilation of Anishinaabe culture.
I am not convinced that the bifurcation evident between the White Earth metis and conservative Anishinaabeg was indeed a matter of emerging ethnicity, as the author suggests in the preface; her subsequent descriptions of the events unfolding from 1889 to 1920 and beyond make this bifurcation more one of economic class, caused by the adaptation to the unique economic and sociopolitical spaces occupied by these two factions at the beginning of reservation life. The metis, having originated in marriages between Euroamerican male traders and Anishinaabe women, followed a patrifocal mold in continuing to emphasize trade as their major form of subsistence. Developing from the fur trade, a pattern was established that considered the Anishinaabeg as purveyors of environmental resources which the metis, in their position of nominally straddling both cultures, then sold on the Euroamerican market. This led to adaptations which supported integration into the market-economy, such as English-language use and anglicized surnames, surplus-creating agriculture, public and off-reservation schooling, and Euro-American appearance and lifestyle. The only item which does not fit is the metis adherence to Catholicism, in a national environment which preferred adherence to a Protestant denomination. Meyer, unfortunately, does not discuss this possible inconsistency.
The diversity of the reservation population which stemmed from their different adaptations to environmental resources and economic systems did apparently not evolve into an acknowledgment of ethnic differences until after the 1887 Dawes Act, the 1889 Nelson Act, and the 1904 Clapp Rider and Steenerson Act. Meyer supports this in her discussion of auto-stereotypes of conservatives, where different lifestyles and adaptive responses are recognized, but just merely as a distinguishing feature, not, yet, as a boundary-mechanism to delineate political orientation or economic philosophy. In other words, while the conservative Anishinaabeg recognized the metis to belong to a different category, they were apparently not a different ethnic group, nor was there a sense of competition or hierarchy. The metis were complementary to the conservatives; both depended on the other and while there appears economic stratification, ethnicity was not its cause. It is interesting to note here, that while Meyer notes that both groups adhere to an endogamous marriage ideal, she also describes a failed political effort of the conservatives due to their small number (p. 199), implying that while the metis might have enforced endogamous marriages, the conservatives apparently had not, and any child of a mixed marriage was counted as a "mixed-blood".
The cultural, economic and philosophical differences between metis and conservative Anishinaabe did not cause the emergence of and focus on ethnicity until outside forces, in their presumably humanitarian effort to assimilate and capitalist effort to make a profit, effectively destroyed the symbiosis of the two Anishinaabe factions. Chapters three and four provide an almost play-by-play account of the events starting with a successfully functioning bi-cultural society before the 1887 Dawes Act and the 1889 Nelson Act, and ending in 1920 with a reservation with problems so common to many others: rising population, alienated resources, and environmental degradation. The author and, in her description, the conservatives as well, put the blame squarely at the feet of the metis, or at least some notorious individuals among them (again, a figure repeating their names in a concise visual display would have eased my recognition of their relationships among themselves and to the conservatives). Apparent economic greed led to outright fraud committed by metis to take control of valuable reservation resources, most notably the timber land, which reduced not only the reservation wide owned "Chippewa in Minnesota Fund" from which internal development should have been financed, but which also effectively reduced the land base necessary to employ the ecologically wise seasonal round and almost irreversible impoverished those cognizant of it.
In order to facilitate the sell-out of reservation resources, the second Clapp Rider (June 21, 1906) stipulated that mixed-bloods were free to sell reservation land without any restrictions. This led to what would indeed become the measure of ethnicity at White Earth: two anthropologists were invited to distinguish "scientifically" who was mixed-blood, and allowed to sell, and who was full-blood, and could not be alienated from her or his land. Taking even a fraction of mixture, according to the opinion of the anthropologists, as indicating mixed-blood, the 1920 tribal roll of 5,173 allottees showed only 408 full-bloods. No allowance was made for culture, religion, language, self-recognition, or genealogy. Being thus divided by outside economic interests and policy decisions, the reservation population quickly responded by infusing the symbols of being "full-blood" or "mixed-blood" with political meaning and proceeded to forge alliances along these lines, a development unprecendented in a community which had, since its inception, been multi-ethnic.
Using the definition of "mixed-blood", the conservatives tried to remove 86 such individuals from the reservation and with that from access to reservation resources, but were, after initial success in 1911, finally unsuccessful in 1916 when these metis were reinstated. It emerged quite clearly that while previously the metis had been accepted as well-meaning intermediaries between conservatives and the off-reservation world, now the notion arose that "the real Indians were being exploited and that mixed-bloods grew wealthy at their expense" (p.181). What also emerged was the financial interest in internal reservation affairs held by outsiders, most notably, lumber and railroad companies and land speculators. Added to the dispossession of allotted, timber, and swampland was the denial of revenue to the "Chippewa in Minnesota Fund", much of which was, for example, used to pay taxes to the public school system of Minnesota in which Indian children were not welcome.
In addition to outright fraud in the alienation of land and financial resources, the mere methods of exploiting the land proved disastrous to those Anishinaabeg who relied on the seasonal round. Logging methods destroyed the environment, state laws established hunting seasons contrary to the residents' needs and experience, and even those who had tried their hand at agriculture found that an ever increasing population restricted to a decreasing land base could not flourish. As a result of this, disease and poverty abounded and many residents left the reservation, but were still entitled to their annuity payments from the Fund. Maybe typical of the "humanitarian" opinion of that time, Meyer quotes Inspector W.H. Gibbs as saying in 1916 that "the impoverishment of the Anishinaabeg was but an unfortunate by-product of `the metamorphosis of an Indian reservation into a civilized, cultivated country'" (p. 224). Such seem the goal of assimilation: impoverishment and alienation of resources to finance outside interests, coupled with the scorn of those who profit for the victims' previous success and current plight.
The book ends on an encouraging note. Only seven percent of White Earth remain under Indian control, but in 1978 tribal researches investigated one-third of all reservation land titles and discovered that of these more than 200,000 acres were held under questionable titles by Euroamerican landholders. Although those "are reluctant to acknowledge the legitimacy of Indian claims" (p. 235), the grass-roots group of heirs, the "Anishinaabe Akeeng" "understand the importance of a land base to economic development and political and cultural autonomy, and are determined to recover as much fraudulently conveyed land as possible" (p. 231). Researchers such as Meyer can only help such efforts.
The story told in "The White Earth Tragedy" is common to Indian country and any student of American history will do well in consulting its detailed descriptions of the process of alienation of Indian resources and the ensuing profit which allowed the US to flourish. But while the author shows the development of ethnic boundaries in the acceptance of such politically dividing labels as "mixed-" and "full-bloods", the metis do not impress me to be assimilated Anishinaabeg, but as being a subgroup of Euroamericans, brandishing the flag of one Indian ancestor to gain access to Indian resources. The ancestral traders of this group acquired Indian wives to establish ties to fur procurers, but the lives and loyalties of these wives are unknown. Are they the truly assimilated ones? Women who left their home and culture to become mere appendages to a Euroamerican trader's household? Or were they the real culture brokers, mediating between their husbands' financial interests and their families' safety and survival? Meyer is silent as to these women and I am left to speculate that indeed they were no more than tools to establish a claim to Anishinaabe resources. The families themselves seem oriented toward a Euroamerican lifestyle, education, and philosophy; this does not make them a different ethnic group than Anishinaabe and Euroamericans, but plants them firmly in the latter camp.
The book is well written, immensely informative and a major contribution to the history of land loss of Native Americans, but it leaves me dissatisfied with its treatment of ethnicity and the role of women in its construction. It also becomes somewhat romantic when the author presses the point that conservative Anishinaabeg have a monopoly to the knowledge of environmental protection and the wise use of their resources. The author is, however, successful and correct in pointing out that the traditional lifestyle of the conservatives had allowed them to lead rich and healthy lives, while their "assimilation" was no more than a death sentence. The inhabitants of Indian country are slowly regaining some of their land base and, rightfully, consider this the only way to survival. We may never be able to reverse the tragedy at White Earth, but the knowledge of its process may lead to recognition of the strategies of dispossession and alienation elsewhere. And with that may come the tools to fight back.