The Chippewas of Lake Superior by Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr. (University of Oklahoma Press, 1979)

Super good book!  I bought it at an antique store in Duluth, MN in the summer of 2009.  I learned a lot from it and some ideas that had been tumbling around inside my mind became a bit more tangible. 

I've never believed that First Nations people were dumb, savages, lazy, etc.  But it is hard to rectify such a personal belief with statistics that show high rates of suicide, unemployment and incarceration.  On top of that are the seemingly commonly held notions that "Indians get handouts" and still complain.  It's a mixed bag of bullshit that I've spent years trying to make sense out of.  This book helped a great deal. 

Danziger begins in the 1800's.  The Chippewa of Lake Superior of that time were still very much rooted in their traditional culture.  In the mid-1800's in North America, the industry was shifting from Fur to Agriculture.  Up until this time, Native people were widely held in regard for their tracking, trapping, hunting and middleman (ie. translating and ambassadorship) skills.  After the shift, these skills were obsolete.  So to were the Native people...unless they could quickly adopt the White ways. 

In the last half of the 1800's, Residential Schools and Boarding Schools were implement to "civilize" Native people.  This was a bad plan that got worse.  At the same time, there was a push to teach Native people to become farmers.  This, too, was a bad plan that never got any better.  Not only was much of the land used by the Chippewas written about by Danziger untenable, but many of the Chippewas didn't have a notion of what farming was, nor any notion about money-based industries.  While this was discussed at the time (the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th), most "help" was mere paternalization and brow-beating about the failure of Native people to (overnight) become adept white people. 

There was ample forestry at that time.  Allotments - parcels of land "given" to Native people - were sometimes used and sometimes sold for lumber.  As above, running a business was as foreign to the Chippewa as building a tank would be to a gregorian monk.  On top of that, there was corruption from some Indian agents and from some contractors. 

Despite this, the Chippewa tried to learn farming, business and a way of adopting the euro-american values while adapting their own traditions to a rapidly changing world.  In the 1930's the Great Depression hit everybody and Chippewa of Lake Superior once again were thrust into poverty. 

In the hundred or so years the Chippewa of Lake Superior have been in contact and in treaty with Europeans and Americans, policies have been implemented to maintain dependency, extinguish, "protect" and, only recently, begin to allow the people themselves some semblence of self-direction.  For the majority of contact, especially, I think, since signing Treaties, Native people, and not just the Chippewa of Lake Superior, have been systematically considered as second-class and as wards of the state. 

For a people with a very loose socio-political affiliation to be thrust into a society that deemed their entire being as an affront to civilization (and, ultimately, at the time, God), to be paternalized as wards of the state unfit or unable (actually un-allowed) to re-invent their own socio-economic system, and then to rise against and above systemic racism and attempts at genocide and to still want to co-exist and prosper as self-determined nations is something to celebrate!  Unfortunately, old stereotypes and prejudices die hard.

Still, I believe the future holds countless possibilities.  As a people, I think the Chippewa and Ojibwe stand a good chance of moving beyond surviving...to thriving!