Ojibwe Absent Narratives in Minnesota Forest Park History Elizabeth Steinson St
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St. Cloud State University theRepository at St. Cloud State Culminating Projects in History Department of History 3-2018 Ojibwe Absent Narratives in Minnesota Forest Park History Elizabeth Steinson St. Cloud State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/hist_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Steinson, Elizabeth, "Ojibwe Absent Narratives in Minnesota Forest Park History" (2018). Culminating Projects in History. 15. https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/hist_etds/15 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at theRepository at St. Cloud State. It has been accepted for inclusion in Culminating Projects in History by an authorized administrator of theRepository at St. Cloud State. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ojibwe Absent Narratives in Minnesota Forest Park History by Elizabeth Ley Steinson A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of St. Cloud State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History March 2018 Committee Members: Robert Galler Jason Eden Robbie Mann 2 Abstract A discursive analysis of Minnesota conservation history, with particular emphasis on the establishment of national forests, follows a recognizable pattern of the benign development of federal and state initiatives to ameliorate environmental despoliation around the turn of the twentieth century. Tensions over the creation of bureaucratic institutions to solve these problems are also generally described in terms of binary struggles between local special interests and conservationists who argued over proper management the land and its resources. Absent from these narratives are the indigenous populations who continued to use these lands and resources and resisted federal and state efforts to impede further loss of their homelands. This thesis is a study in the development of worldviews that informed both Euro-American and Ojibwe use of lands and resources in Minnesota before the era of conservation around the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, this work considers how early twentieth century conservation discourse about the establishment of the United States’ first national “forest parks” in Minnesota obscures the agency of Ojibwes in maintaining traditional occupation and use of these contentious lands. This thesis also seeks to fill the gap with Ojibwe absent narratives of persistence and adaptation of traditional ways into the first few decades of the 1900s, as well as continued resistance to the formation of the nation’s first national forests in Minnesota. 3 Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to faculty members of the history department at Saint Cloud State University. Specifically, I would like to thank Mzee Peter Nayenga, whose introductory course in African history was among the first I had taken at SCSU. Dr. Nayenga opened my mind to a rich history of indigenous struggles with colonization in a way that led me to shift my major to history. Professors Jeffery Mullins and Robert Galler’s courses in American cultural history and Indian history continued to inspire and challenge me to think of history as an act, as well as a discipline of social science, through challenging investigative research. I would also like to thank Dr. Jason Eden for the idea of centering my argument for this thesis within the environmental history. My thesis would not be the same without the inspiration and opportunity for analysis provided in his course on environmental history methods. As my advisor, Dr. Galler has continued to encourage the development of this thesis. I am deeply indebted to him for his advice. I am also eternally indebted to Bill Latady, curator at the Bois Forte Heritage Center and Mary Graves, Chief of Resources at Voyageurs National Park, for leading me to primary sources central to this thesis. I hope this thesis supports their good work. Above all, I am eternally grateful for the support of my family. Seth, Grace, and Elenore, you are the light of my life. Your patience and encouragement have been essential in the hard work of creating this thesis. 4 Table of Contents Chapter Page 1: Introduction to Absent Ojibwe Narratives and the Development of Forestry Conservation in Minnesota ..................................................5 Anishinaabe Culture: Review of Relevant Literature ...................................................19 Conservation: Review of Relevant Literature...............................................................23 Chapter Outline .............................................................................................................29 2: Ojibwe Worldviews and Land as Central to Culture ............................................................32 Foundations of Resource Commodification in Indigenous North America .................41 Conflicting Expectations: The Treaty-Making Era .......................................................45 Making National Forest Reserves: The Allotment Era .................................................59 3: Challenging the Dominant Conservation Narrative of National Forest and Park-Making in Minnesota ......................................66 Conservation and Preservation as Acts of Colonization ...............................................68 Complicating a Master Narrative: Conservation Discourse in Minnesota ...................75 Deconstructing the Absent/Prisoner Narrative .............................................................86 Early Ojibwe Resistance to the National Forest ...........................................................94 4: Complicating the Dominant Narrative of Conservation .......................................................106 Treaty Rights and Minnesota National Forest Lands ...................................................110 Bois Forte Ojibwe: Persistence and Adaptation of Anishinaabe Ways ........................125 Ojibwe Labor and Persistence of Anishinaabe Industry ...............................................142 5: Chapter 5: Conclusions .........................................................................................................152 Works Cited ..............................................................................................................................164 5 Chapter 1: Introduction to Absent Ojibwe Narratives and the Development of Forestry Conservation in Minnesota The two hundred years of mingled Indian and European/American history that had gone before dissolved into a fanciful past where jolly voyageurs and noble but doomed savages paddled the rivers in birch bark canoes and tracked the beaver to its lodge -- the stuff of summer camp adventures and bedtime tales.1 ~ North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd Place is personal. In June of 2016, at a Minnesota Humanities Center conference near Lake Phalen in St. Paul, Minnesota, my own concept of “place” shifted. This region, known as the Bdote to Dakota, is a central place of origin and creation in their tradition. Mona Smith, contributing scholar to the Minnesota Humanities Center and Dakota writer, spoke of how the “earth remembers our footprints,” according to a Dakota worldview. The twentieth century “tried very hard to erase the importance of Native Americans from our places... Place, as a lens of study, is personal, accessible, and memorable.”2 As I listened to Smith and other Dakota storytellers tell a history of Fort Snelling, Pilot Knob, and Mounds Park to include a much earlier history of Bdote, the importance of these places widened to include both Euro-American and indigenous perspectives. Historical context even shifted my understanding of Fort Snelling State Park as a place of reconciliation and on-going healing for Dakota who were forced to march there following the U.S. Dakota War. Sometimes, context changes everything. Smith, speaking of place and the importance of it to indigenous populations, described how wisdom has come to her in the most unconventional of ways. Years ago, she watched a hypnotist remove the number four from the minds of volunteers on a stage. They had no 1 Mary Lethert Wingerd, North Country: The Making of Minnesota. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2010), 358. 2 Mona Smith, “Place Matters,” presented at 2016 Summer Educators’ Institute “Transforming Education Through Absent Narratives,” St. Paul, MN, on June 26, 2016. 6 problems speaking without the number four, counting “one, two, three, five, six, seven...” rather easily, until they were asked what six minus two was. Smith describes how they stared blankly at the question, not necessarily alarmed or all that confused, just blank. Indigenous people, she declared, are the number four. Adding an indigenous story, she maintained, shakes up how many “understand the way things are.”3 In A Good Time for Truth, an anthology of essays on race in Minnesota, Heid E. Erdich wrestles with what she describes as indigenous “blankness” and her identification as both white and Ojibwe in her poetry entitled “Red, White, and Blank.” Historical simplification of hundreds of tribes and hundreds of legal treaties “make a lie of the complex and ongoing relationship between our nations and our other nation, the U.S. government.” The result is “a determined denial of a violent and colonial history that includes not only slavery and segregation but, before that, the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous people that eventually required the import of slaves.”4