The Ojibwe Nation

0:00This message comes from Carvana, who makes car selling easy. Enter your license plate or VIN, get a real offer in minutes, and have your car picked up from your door. Sell your car the easy way with Carvana. Pickup fee may apply. This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Ramtin Adab-Louis. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Up until this point in the series, we've been talking about the birth of the United States as a nation and how different groups of people pushed for the expansion of what it meant to be American.

0:41But the reality is, Native people inhabited the land that we now call the United States long before Europeans set foot on North America. And as the U.S. continued to grow and expand, Native peoples had different experiences and relationships with the strangers that arrived on their shores. Today on the show, NPR reporter Sequoia Carrillo and through-line producer Anya Steinberg bring us the story of the Ojibwe people and how in the face of U.S. westward expansion, they created a nation to try to preserve their land and way of life. That story after a quick break.

1:46Thank you. and get$100 off at linkedin.com slash NPR offer. Terms and conditions apply. The story goes back over a thousand years to how Ojibwe people first came to the Great Lakes region. It feels different when your family has been buried in the same place longer than America has been a country. This is Anton Troyer. He's a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University. For him, the story of how the Ojibwe people ended up calling these lakes home is a personal one.

2:33At one point in time, just a couple thousand years ago, we lived on the east coast, Atlantic coast, which was a land abundant in small game, big game, well-suited for indigenous agriculture, lots of fish in the sea, lots of fish in inland lakes. We can track the beginning of Ojibwe people to Algonquian language tribes from the east coast. We had prophets who appeared and said, move west to the land where food grows on water. It was a reference to the wild rice. And there was a long migration. And it was a long, slow process. For centuries, Ojibwe people kept moving. And as a result, we ended up spanning a huge geography, thousands of miles.

3:18Until they made it to the Great Lakes region. But even then, movement was still a part of life. Because of this persistent migration pattern over a long period of time, if someone got too bossy or even just got too much influence, someone else was usually moving down the river and saying, they're not my chief. So Ojibwe culture tended to be very tolerant of cultural variation, but very intolerant of being told what to do.

3:52There was no such thing as a national Ojibwe identity. So there was no such thing as an Ojibwe nation? For decades, Ojibwe people lived in small communities across the region. They brokered deals with the neighboring Dakota people, as well as the French, the British, and after the American Revolution, the U.S. government. The United States do engage to guarantee to the aforesaid nation of Delawares and their heirs all their territorial rights in the fullest and most ample manner. 1778. And that's when things began to change in a big way. Because the more U.S. settlers and business leaders encroached on Ojibwe homelands, the more some leaders felt they had to act as a single entity.

4:40It's important to note that that was a new development. and it naturally met with a lot of resistance. But still, the idea of an Ojibwe nation was fast becoming an appealing tool for negotiating with the U.S. government. And perhaps no one saw that more clearly than the chief of the Mississippi Band of Ojibwe, Bogunogishig, or as he was known in English, Hole in the Day.

5:06He was distinguished for his eloquence, wisdom, and force of argument. The young men of his tribe acknowledged him as a leader. Missionary Alfred Brunson. Hole in the day had big dreams to lead the Ojibwe people, and his ideas were starting to work. People were drawn to him.

5:31One day, after drinking a little too much whiskey with some fur traders, he fell off his wagon in a stupor and was crushed. It seemed like the end of his great vision for the Ojibwe people. But as he lay dying, he summoned his son. And with his last breath, he said, Take the tribe by the hand. Show them how to walk. His 19-year-old son took his name and became whole in the day the younger. He vowed to make his father's dream come true and promised to usher in a new era of one Ojibwe nation. Holand the Day was quite brash. He sometimes inflamed other Ojibwe leaders when he would claim to be chief of them all or chief of an entire region that included multiple villages, many of which had their own chiefs.

6:27Holand the Day was young, he was cocky, and he was ready to make his mark. And he made that obvious at his first treaty negotiation in 1847. 1847. His father had just passed away, and there might have been 200 other Ojibwe leaders from around the region there. And he said, he came a day late, and then he said, stop what you're doing. Now, if I say sell, we sell. And if I say no, we don't. You have called together all the chiefs and headmen of the nation. That was useless, for they do not own the land. It belongs to me. My father, by his bravery, took it from the Sioux. He died a few moons ago, and what belonged to him became mine.

7:15He, by his courage and perseverance, became head chief, and when he died, I took his place and am consequently chief over all the nation. Which was ridiculous and probably offensive, but really impressed the Americans. Here were powerful chiefs, some of them 70 or 80 years old, who, before his coming, spoke sneeringly of him as a boy who could have no voice in the council, saying there was no use in waiting for him. But when he appeared, they became his most submissive and obedient subjects, and this in a treaty in which a million acres of land were seated. The terms of the treaty were concluded between the commissioners and young hole in the day alone.

8:02The move was a big gamble, but it paid off. Hole in the day, the younger quickly ascended to power. He took the helm at a moment when Native land across North America was being lost at an alarming rate. He was one of the most effective and knowledgeable Ojibwe leaders of his time. He had traveled to Washington, D.C. many times. He was not a passive leader just waiting to see what would happen to the people. He refused to seed land without putting up a fight for what he thought was best for the Ojibwe people. Though it may cost me my liberty, it is my duty, and I will continue to speak and act also, till the wrongs of my people shall be righted.

8:46And he was not afraid of the personal consequences. Certainly it is true that Hole in the Day had very strong and powerful friends and very strong and powerful enemies. People tended to either love him or hate him. The U.S. government, for its part, was more than happy to have just one single Ojibwe leader to negotiate with. Hole in the Day plays a heavy hand, and he was very, very effective. But the game was rigged. He had just come from Washington, D.C. It was 1868. The previous year, Hull in the Day had negotiated another very controversial treaty that was trying to consolidate all Ojibwe people onto one single reservation.

9:36It was a hard deal to swallow. He had some really telling things that he told his people. He said, look, these are heartbreaking times for our people. At the time, westward migration was at a fever pitch. The government had just purchased Alaska, and the idea of Manifest Destiny, the God-given right of white Americans to expand across the entire continent, was being realized. Holen the Day saw all this and adapted his strategies. He told his people, I would love to say that there's a way to get all the white people to leave us alone, and to leave our lands, and let us live as we always have. But I don't think there's a way to go back in time.

10:18But there is a way forward. The way Hole in the Day saw it, if the U.S. government was hell-bent on putting his people onto a single reservation, then it needed to build the infrastructure that would set them up for success. And so he said, I want them to build a house for every single one of you. I want them to build a grist mill and a sawmill so that we can adopt these modern enterprises and have good homes. And to make sure they actually got these things, Hole in the Day had a plan. They would all stay put until the reservation was built. Don't go anywhere. If you go, we will lose our leverage to get those things, which are promised to us in this treaty.

10:59But times were really tough, and some people left in search of a better life. It also became clear that the Americans were not living up to their side of the bargain. And Holmladay said, well, if they're not going to work with me, we might have to do this a different way. And he said, I'm going to go back to Washington, D.C. He set out on a late June day in 1868. But on his way... He was accosted by assassins. Pulled off of his carriage, stabbed multiple times, shot, and killed him. The impact of this death was immediate. It was devastating for many of his people. And it was devastating for generations.

11:50Holniday's death created a power vacuum that resulted in the loss of more and more Ojibwe land. You had lots of white settlement that immediately flowed after his death. And so, you know, it was devastating for his friends and it was devastating for his enemies in the long run. The vision Holniday had for his people would never be. Instead, his death opened up the floodgates and left the nation vulnerable to the violent tides of the time. From the building of dams that flooded Ojibwe homes, to the growth of the timber industry, all the way to the process of allotment.

12:37Allotment was a federal policy that divided reservation land into privately owned parcels. These parcels were then allotted to tribal members. Before, most land had been owned in common. What this really means is tribes collectively owned all their land. Allotment was all about introducing private ownership, which was already becoming a cornerstone of the American dream. And it dovetailed with another process. This is the big era of cultural assimilation. So tremendous pressure put on Indian people to assimilate. This is Brenda Child. She's an Ojibwe historian and professor at the University of Minnesota.

13:18Allotment was one step in forcing this assimilation process. And in the United States, there was kind of consensus that Indian people needed to change. Kill the Indian, save the man would soon be a common refrain. The idea was to get rid of all Native culture at any cost. There were people around the United States and in Washington and in kind of reform circles who believed at that time that Indian people were people of the past, right? That they weren't really going to kind of continue into the future as tribal people. So if Indian people can't survive as tribal people, maybe they can just survive.

14:07And so they can become citizens of the United States. Eventually, they can speak English, they can become Christians, they can Americanize. And then they can move into the mainstream of American society. An allotment was seen as a way to accelerate that process of Americanization. They've got as far as they can go because they own their land in common. There is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. It's funny because a policy like the Allotment Act of 1887, when you look at it and you read it, it's very technical. And in some ways, it sounds like it's going to protect Indians.

14:44It was seen as so progressive. And the most progressive of Indian reformers favored the allotment of reservations. The idea was that Native families would own their own land. They could farm it and build generational wealth just like white Americans. They, too, could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But from the beginning, the system was flawed. You know, sometimes there's a word that people don't like to use called conspiracy. Politicians and timber companies and banks in Minnesota conspired with one another to dispossess Indians of their land. Individual families were left to the mercy of businessmen who did whatever it took to snatch up land, parcel by parcel.

15:37Not all Native nations and tribes participated in allotment the same way. Even among the Ojibwe people, the experience was different. But for many Native people, the process of allotment and U.S. westward expansion left them estranged from their own land. By the end of the allotment era, tribes had lost control of over 90 million acres of land.

16:12That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more about the lasting impact a lot men had on different Ojibwe bands, make sure to check out the full-length episode called A Tale of Two Tribal Nations. And join us next week, where we continue the story of U.S. expansion beyond the continental U.S. It's the Teddy Roosevelt era. It's the era of machismo, of doing things. Women were excluded, people of color excluded, but men like Minor Keith, the world belonged to them, and it was theirs for the taking. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Moghada and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Thuline production team.

16:58Music, as always, by me, Ramtin Adablui, and my band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Ramtin Adabloui and Randa Abdelfattah. Thank you for listening.

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