Larry Nesper, “Our Relations…The Mixed Bloods”: Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021)

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, European nations encountered diverse North American Indigenous groups possessing overlapping – and often contested – ecological niches, subsistence strategies, spiritual practices, and political alliances. These initial contacts evolved quickly into trading partnerships and political alliances as rival colonial powers sought to establish continental “beachheads” prior to westward expansion. By the mid-19th century, European colonies in North America had evolved into independent nation-states, while Indigenous groups struggled unsuccessfully to maintain their autonomy in the face of shrinking hunting territories, epidemic disease, and settler violence.

In the northern reaches of the continent, the U.S. and Canadian boundaries along the 49th parallel and the Alaska/Yukon borders respectively were codified into law. As the national boundaries evolved, so did the destinies of those Indigenous groups whose traditional territories were bisected arbitrarily by these imposed national boundaries. One of the Indigenous polities affected was the Anishinaabe/Chippewa, also known as the Ojibwa. The bands located southwest of the Great Lakes became “American” by default, and it is Wisconsin Chippewa communities bordering the southern shores of Lake Superior that Larry Nesper details in his book.

What follows is a complex, multidisciplinary analysis of how 19th-century federal Indigenous policy failed to protect the ancestral lands of the Great Lakes Chippewa. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the reader to the natural environment of the southern Great Lakes, and to the Anishinaabe themselves, a collectivity characterized by its ethnic and racial inclusivity during the years of the colonial fur trade. During this period, there was little or no ethnic separation between full-bloods and mixed-bloods. However, this was to change as the fur trade declined in importance, and westward expansion accelerated.

Chapter 3 focusses on the past negotiation of treaties with the Great Lakes Chippewa, and how emerging concepts of race shaped differential government responses to mixed-bloods and full bloods. Tribal leaders’ insistence that their mixed-race relations be included in any treaty agreements prompted government negotiators to consider Darwinian concepts of human evolution in their negotiations. One of these ideas, particularly the notion that agriculturalists were evolutionally superior to hunters and gatherers, provided the rationale needed to negotiate separate, parallel provisions for mixed-bloods among the Chippewa. Previous investigations suggested a link between the creation of separate 80-acre allotments for mixed-blood families in the 1854 treaty and the eventual dispossession of these families due to pressure from commercial lumber and mining interests at a later date. Indeed, out of nearly four dozen treaties negotiated in the region, there were nearly twenty separate land cessions from the 1820s to the 1850s.

The remainder of the book is a step-by-step accounting of over 200 years of struggle by various bands of Great Lakes Chippewa against government and business interests eager to acquire and exploit previously ceded reservation wetlands adjacent to reservations. Because government was legally required to maintain environmental protections due to Indigenous harvesting rights enshrined in various treaties, conservation was maintained for a time. However, by 2013 the state of Wisconsin introduced an industry-friendly mining bill that lowered the environmental requirements for business in the region, placing the annual wild rice harvest in jeopardy.

Nesper concludes that despite the efforts of tribal leaders to ensure the inclusion of their Métis kin in any distribution of land and benefits, the decision to create a distinct and separate category for mixed-race families at the outset of negotiations, served to isolate them legally from “full-bloods” on the reservations, and made their retention of their allotted lands tenuous, at best.

This is a complex and useful book. The initial chapters, featuring the work of scholars from both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, provide a solid historiographical foundation for the discussions that follow. For readers familiar with the sorry history of Métis scrip distribution and dispossession, this book will rekindle the debate over how governments’ use of allotments and scrip served to undermine, rather than preserve, Indigenous title to land in North America.

Heather Devine

University of Calgary

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v92.0014.