Red Cliff, Wisconsin by Howard Paap

Author:Howard Paap
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.
Published: 2015-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

2.

At times we are given bits and pieces of instances wherein Ojibwe male leaders spoke of the political challenges occurring in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but the Ojibwes’ female voice is much less evident. We know that Ojibwe women, like Susan Johnston at Sault Ste. Marie, were not only interested in and informed about these things, and were powerful forces in their communities, but quite unfortunately, the written record gives us little from them. In 1826, Obarguwack, an elderly woman from an unidentified Ojibwe community, spoke in the opening session at Fond du Lac, but she was filling in for her ill husband rather than serving as a band representative in her own right.41 For the first three hundred years or more of contact between Europeans (and Euro-Americans) and the Ojibwe, written history portrays tribal (and non-tribal) women as virtual non-players in matters of international relations. Although in important ways tribal women were involved in all important political decisions, it is only until the late twentieth century that this was understood by non-native writers.42

We look to the early years of written history on Ojibwe relationships with the Europeans and Americans and find a record of events essentially about the white man and how he came and changed things. We have virtually nothing from the discussions inside the native community until much later, but this shortcoming of the literature should not let us assume that these discussions did not exist. The series of shifting alliances between the Ojibwe, French, Dakota, and English we discussed in earlier chapters shows that a viable dynamic of political maneuvering ensued from the seventeenth century up to the nineteenth. Throughout these approximately two hundred years—the time of the fur trade—the native peoples were role players in these important international arenas.

In the 1820s, the written record showing Buffalo’s leadership at La Pointe may be scant, but it hints at his deep concern about such challenges. By the time of the Prairie du Chien, Fond du Lac and Butte des Morts treaties, he likely sensed that the fur trade would soon end, and although the Ojibwe economy could still survive with its traditional round of winter hunting, spring spearing and sugar making, summer gardening, fall rice harvesting and fish netting, by the 1820s, he seemingly feared that its future was starting to look suspect. Surely, Buffalo’s concerns about the future were foreshadowed by his earnest acceptance of Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s New Religion only several years previous to his signing of these treaties.

It is not insignificant that according to William Warren, among the western lakes Ojibwe leaders it was La Pointe’s Buffalo and Leech Lake’s Eshkibagikoonzh (Flat Mouth) who were the most enthusiastic in their acceptance of the Shawnee religious and political movement. The Leech Lake community, as the Ojibwe vanguard into Dakota lands, assumed the major role in military action against these western peoples, and a decade or two after the demise of the New Religion it was these western Ojibwe, as described by a recent writer, who assumed a stance of “passive defiance” against the Americans.

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