William Cronon - 460 Handout 20 - Changing Landscapes of Native Wisconsin (Kivi)

Lecture #20: The Changing Landscapes of Native Wisconsin (Thomas Kivi)

Outline

Reflecting This Time of Year on Native History and Culture

This lecture is about how American Indian nations in Wisconsin and their ancestors have thought about and related to the land and waters of the upper Mississippi River valley, and outlines a few of the ways that Native tribes have shaped, and continue to shape, the experience of the landscape that was transformed over the course of the nineteenth century into the “Badger state.”

Changes in Upper Mississippi Valley Different from New England

Subsistence practices, spiritual connections to land, and seasonal migration are all important to keep in mind when thinking about Native Wisconsin, but an important difference from New England in 1800 is that this region of the western Great Lakes was still “Indian country”—it was a land of lakes, rivers, prairies, and forest where the political, economic, and social relations between neighboring Indian bands and tribes were more distantly connected to the force of technology, markets, and a commodity-minded culture remaking the landscapes of Indigenous New England.

Transformations that look something like the “fields and fences” of New England would occur in the second-half of the 19th century, although at much more industrial scales (I’m thinking here of Bill’s book Nature’s Metropolis about the rise of Chicago and the regional transformations shaped by industrial processes in Chicago and capital from New York City). But American Indian life in the upper Mississippi River valley would remain through those changes, building connections and establishing themselves as sovereign Indian nations within their traditional homelands, while adapting to the material realities of a landscape remade by railroads, lumber, dairy, and “outdoor” tourism.

Three Framing Questions of the Lecture

1) What do I mean by Native Wisconsin?

An American Indian perspective (Native Americans, American Indians, Indians, Indigenous peoples, First Nations). In this sense, “Native Wisconsin” encompasses Indian individuals, communities, and nations with ancestral ties to the Wisconsin landscape, as well as Native groups that have called Wisconsin home but were not always living in the region.

2) What are the changes to the Native Wisconsin and the Wisconsin landscape more generally?

The changes to Native landscapes of Wisconsin are readily discernible in the ways that U.S. treaties in the early-to-mid nineteenth century separated Indian bands and tribes from their homelands and their non-human kin. Treaties were legal instruments for bringing vast tracts of tribal homelands into U.S. Federal control while also separating and alienating Indian peoples from that landscape. Treaties cleared the way for the dramatic changes of the later-nineteenth century which transformed the Wisconsin landscape into a resource frontier of national and global markets for lead, lumber, wheat, dairy, and scenic “nature” tourism.

3) How did Wisconsin remain Native through these changes to the landscape?

U.S. settler colonialism in North America—which removed Indigenous peoples and populated the landscape with Euro-American settlers in their place—was devastating to the political and economic autonomy of Indian nations. However, if we describe this as a sweeping and absolute process, we ignore the complicated and important ways that Native peoples have struggled and succeeded in the face of enormous hardships, to retain meaningful connections to the Wisconsin landscape, to resist Indian removal policy, to preserve tribal languages and the traditional cultural practices which express distinctly Native relationships to the this landscape today.

One very important point I hope to make in this lecture is that Indian treaties and removal are more like a chapter of Native experiences in Wisconsin, not the conclusion to the story of Native Wisconsin. Wisconsin “Indian country” did not succumb to some singular all-encompassing, sweeping process that pushed Indians off the land and brought Euro-American settlers brought “improvement” and “civilization” to the landscape. The history was is a messy story of conquest and a long struggle against an invading empire (there was no shortage of armed conflict as a consequence). This patchwork geography of the tribal land of Indian nations is a material, geographical reflection of Native histories and relations to the U.S. that continue to the present

What Does This Map of Tribal Lands in Wisconsin Tell Us? What Does It Hide?

Let me begin by asking: What can we tell about the history of American Indian bands and tribes in Wisconsin from this map of tribal lands today? What is it that the map hides? What are the relationships between these lands? Are these Native experiences uniform or relatively interchangeable? By the end of this lecture, I hope you’ll be able to look at this relatively conventional road map and have some better answers for why the geography of Wisconsin Indian country looks this way.

Cultural Values Are Embedded in Tribal Origin Stories and Languages

The seals of the twelve Indian nations in Wisconsin reflect the inextricable connections to the land, animals, plants, and waters that sustain the cultural, political, and economic identities of Wisconsin Indian nations. Let me give you a few examples.

Menominee Origins

The oral traditions of the tribal nations of Wisconsin carry stories of their cultural, social, and spiritual origins. The Menominee (Omeaqnomenewak) trace their origins to the mouth of the Menominee River on the north shores of Green Bay on Lake Michigan. The Menominee people originate at the mouth of that river, where the five clans of Menominee social structure were created (Bear, Eagle, Wolf, Moose, and Crane). On the left of the seal is a kind of birds eye view of the geographic depiction of the Menominee reservation with pine forests inlaid, on the right side of the seal is a cross-section of a tree trunk, representing the Menominee’s relationship to Wisconsin forests and the lumber industry.

Ho-Chunk Origins

Ho-Chunk (Hochungra, who have sometimes been known as Winnebagoes, although the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska continue to use that name for themselves) have lived in the region south and west of present-day Green Bay for thousands of years. According to Ho-Chunk oral traditions, they originated there at Moga-Shooch (Red Banks). The University of Wisconsin campus and the city of Madison sit in De Jope, meaning in Ho-Chunk “four lakes,” and was home to Ho-Chunk villages before the city or the university were built. The area along the Wisconsin River near present-day Wisconsin Dells (in Ho-Chunk: “Neesh”) was also an important site for Ho-Chunk spiritual rejuvenation and community. They call themselves Hochungra, which means “people of the big (or sacred) voice” (this owing to their linguistic relationships to Siouan speaking people of the greater region).

Ho-Chunk social structures, like the Menominee, are divided between (Upper) earth and (Lower) sky clans; unlike the Menominee, the sky clans in Ho-Chunk society—particularly Wakaja (Thunder Clan)—produces the peace chiefs while and the earth provide war chiefs. There are twelve clans in the Ho-Chunk Nation. As you can see in the seal of the Ho-Chunk Nation, there is a thunderbird carrying a pipe that represents the peace-keeping role of the six upper clans, while the bear below the war club represents the six lower clans (Bear clans maintain order, provide soldiers and police).

Anishinaabe Origins

The origin story of the Ojibwe (Chippewa/Anishinaabe) bands of northern Wisconsin differ from the Ho-Chunk and Menominee. According to oral traditions, the Anishinaabe people were born in the Great Lakes region but underwent a long-ago migration to the eastern shores of North America, and then returned to the region where the sacred food that grows on the water—that food being wild rice, Manoomin. These band and tribe cultural identities and practices reflect deep cultural, spiritual, political, and economic bonds with the Wisconsin landscape, bonds which are still present. For the Anishinaabe people, wild rice is kin—more like a brother or sister to the human community rather than a simple resource. For the Ojibwe and Menominee (people of the wild rice), the practice of gathering wild rice along the rivers and lakes up northern Wisconsin is an integral part of their cultural identities, part of traditional practices that have sustained their communities for many, many generations—even as they have changed over those generations (particularly in the twentieth century). You can see the practicing of gathering wild rice with “knocking sticks” in canoes depicted in the Sokoagon Chippewa seal

Native languages reflect cultural connections to land

Native relationships with the Wisconsin landscape are reflected in Indian languages. The Menominee language is a language of the woods, especially well-equipped to describe the seasonal landscapes of the Menominee homeland. There are many words readily available for snow. There’s a word for “falling snow,” for “snow on the ground,” for “crusted snow,” for “snowflakes.” As Ron Corn Jr. says in the short education video on Menominee language revitalization, a challenge to teaching his daughter to speak the language is finding a way to reconstruct the language to fit the realities of day-to-day life beyond the natural world so intricately woven into the Menominee vocabulary:

Says Ron Corn Jr. “[T]here’s words readily available for everything in nature…. How do we make that transition into today’s life too? We’re not always sugaring, we’re not always ricing. We spend a lot of days at home, in the office, on the road. We’ve got to learn to express those things too, you know. The language has to make that transition if it’s gonna be relevant and if it’s gonna survive, you know.” [there are currently only about 10 fluent speakers of the language among 10,000 tribal members]

Potawatomi language distinguishes animate from inanimate

American Indian languages reflect the contrast in worldviews between Europeans and Indigenous cultural imaginations of land, animal, and plant life that we saw in Bill’s book Changes in the Land. There is a major distinction between animate and non-animate objects in the Potawatomi language. Unlike the English language where we might refer to everything in the world except other humans as objects rather than fellow subjects of experience, the Potawatomi language—like other Indian languages in Wisconsin—defines plants, animals, and other living beings alongside humans as animate. One would describe a plant or animal in much the way that one would describe a friend or family member. Only man-made, non-living things would be described as inanimate. The Potawatomi Dictionary produced by the Forest County Potawatomi in Crandon, WI, has become crucial to language revitalization for all nine bands of the Potawatomi Nation beyond the state.

In Addition to Language, the Material Landscape Reflects Indigenous Cultures

Effigy Mounds

Wisconsin is home to the highest concentration of earthen mounds called “effigy” mounds anywhere in the United States. These mounds, which were predominately built near rivers and bodies of water, are estimated by archeologists to have been built between 800 and 1250 years ago. These mounds are called effigy mounds because they were, predominately, made in the shape of animals.

“Man Mound” is a notable exception to the focus on animal representations in effigy mounds. The humanoid figure outside of Baraboo—located near the Wisconsin River in Sauk County—is 236 feet long, raised 2.5 feet off the ground, and is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is the last remaining of five known anthropomorphic effigy mounds known to exist in North America, all of which are located in Wisconsin.

Around 80% of the known mounds in Wisconsin have been destroyed, although mounds continue to be discovered. There are many mounds still visible in the Madison area around Lake Mendota and Lake Monona. The city of Madison and the UW-campus sits atop land that was once home to Ho-Chunk villages known as De Jope (four lakes), among other Indian tribes trading and hunting in the region.

Aztalan, Mississippian mounds

The Wisconsin landscape also bears the mark of Mississippian mound-building culture distinct from the effigy mound builders. About a half-hour drive east of Madison you’ll arrive in Lake Mills, which features a mound complex that bears the mark of the mound-building cultures of Cahokia (near present-day St. Louis, Missouri). A National Historic Landmark, Aztalan was a community of Late Woodlands peoples and Mississippian peoples who traveled upstream from Cahokia to the site on the Crawfish River (via the Mississippi River and Rock River). The historical presence of Mississippian culture in Wisconsin is illustrated by the flat-topped, pyramidical mounds at Aztalan. Walls of wood and clay surrounded the town. For archaeologists, Aztalan demonstrates the expansion and contraction of Indigenous polities (with hierarchical social structures) before Europeans arrived in the region

Tribal geography before French arrive in the 17th century

First peoples of Wisconsin have been, and continue to be, distinct cultures that “evolved from and intersected with earlier ones” (Loew, 1). When the French first arrived in the region, Siouan-speakers Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) and Dakota (Sioux) lived in the north and western part of the state. Algonquian-speaking Menominee, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi peoples lived in the northeast, central, southern part of state (Loew, 7). Much as the subsistence practices of Indians of New England depended on the length of growing seasons, subsistence practices in southern Wisconsin relied on more agriculture and larger villages (Ho-Chunk, Menominee) while northern Indians like the Ojibwe lived in small, more mobile bands geared toward hunting, harvesting wild rice and maple sugar.

French and Indians on the Middle Ground (17th and 18th centuries)

This section explains why the upper Mississippi Valley remained “Indian country” until the early-19th century. The riverine world was, in reality, a Native world where French traders had to navigate and negotiate diplomatic alliances and trade relations with village, band, and tribal leaders in terms that established trust and amicable relations within the cultural norms of intertribal diplomacy. Unlike the fixed communities of Protestant households in New England that bounded the land and alienated Indians from ways of living off that land, and which demanded Indian assimilation to Christianity and private land ownership, traders from New France were men who adopted the norms of ritual, political, and economic worlds of the peoples of the upper Mississippi River and western Great Lakes region.

Why didn’t France colonize the way the English did?

First, the climate of much of New France was not all that well suited to the kind of agricultural production you’d see in New England. Second, the hunger for land in the North American colonies and the economic autonomy such migration promised was not as strong for the French peasant class as it was for the English who were displaced by policies of “enclosing” common grazing land. As historian Alan Taylor writes in American Colonies, “peasant resistance, often violent, prevented their lords from adopting the English program of rural rationalization and enclosure that dispossessed and dislocated the English rural poor” (368). Instead, the French crown would license fur traders to travel the waters of the St. Lawrence valley and the Great Lakes region, where they navigated the diplomatic and norms of exchange in Indian country to acquire furs through trade.

Names of early French traders-explorers

Jean Nicolet greeted by Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and other tribal peoples (1632)

Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet portage from Fox River to Wisconsin River (1673)

Cavalier de La Salle completes a journey to mouth of Mississippi River (1682)

Beaver Wars and the migration of tribes in the eastern Great Lakes

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Haudenosaunee had depleted the beavers in their homeland, and the conflict over competition for beaver furs moved inland up the St. Lawrence valley and along the southern edges of the Great Lakes. This led to a number of refugee bands and tribes moving further west. American Indian peoples living in present-day Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio—Sauk, Mascouten, Potawatomi, and Kickapoo—pushed west and north from the southern edge of Lake Michigan, while Ojibwe, Odaawa, Meskwaki (Fox), and Iroquois tribes outside of the Five Nations Confederacy encroached on Ho-Chunk and Menominee lands from the north. This influx of refugee bands from the east also pushed the Sioux further west onto the Great Plains. The Ho-Chunk and Menominee fought against the encroachments and suffered greatly. Owing to the spread of disease as well as wars with the Odaawa, Meskwaki, and Illinois Confederacy, the Ho-Chunk population was less than 10 percent of its population by 1665, dropping from around 4,000 or 5,000 people to 600 or 700 members. They began to rebuild their nation by establishing kinship ties with their Algonquian neighbors (Loew, 12-14).

Cultural hybridity and French-Indian diplomacy in the pays d’en haut

A very influential monograph on this topic is a now classic book by environmental historian Richard White called the The Middle Ground (1991) which examined the cultural co-creations of French and Indians in this region he calls the pays d’en haut—which translates to the “upper country”—where neither French nor Indian could force the other to abide by their norms or expectations. White identified pieces of diplomatic ritual as an especially crucial to mediating disagreements and establishing alliances.

Kinship ties and the fur trade

Although the official policy of the French crown would also seek to “Frenchify” the Indians, it was often the other way around—French men adopting the cultural practices of their Indigenous trading partners and allies. Marriages between Indian women and French fur trading voyageurs led to the formation of Metis populations of mixed Indian and French ancestry within the emerging network of fur trading settlements at places like Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Within these more intimate and gendered contexts, relations between French men and Indian women could involve cultural adaptation in the other direction. As historian Susan Sleeper-Smith argued in Indian Women and French Men, through their strategic adoption of forms of “frontier Catholicism,” Indian women became powerful players within the kinship networks of the Great Lakes fur trade—their family’s claims to Catholic faith and French ancestry when U.S. sovereignty in the region pushed for treaties that necessitated removal from their homelands.

The Collapse of the Middle Ground, the Birth of the Northwest Territory

Hybridized forms of diplomacy and commerce within the French and Indian communities of the region broke down after New France lost control of the fur trade of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Valley to Britain after the French and Indian War (1754-63). After the War of 1812, the U.S. secured their sovereign claim to the Great Lakes region that was initially ceded after the American Revolution as part of the Treaty of Paris (1783). Although the Continental Congress established the U.S. “Northwest Territory” in 1787—that territorial claim from which the Wisconsin Territory and the State of Wisconsin were born—the bulk of U.S. political, economic, and military presence remained east and south of the upper Mississippi River valley. The British, in spite of ceded the territory the U.S., nevertheless remained the dominant non-Indian power in the region. Most tribes in the region sided with their British trading partners during the War of 1812, seeing their alliance as a means of preventing the land-hungry Americans from moving into their lands, to stave off the march of backcountry squatters and retributive violence that characterized Indian-American relations in the Ohio River valley.

Treaty Making and the Invasion of Lead Country

As much as they were instrumental to the transformation of Wisconsin into the dairy landscape we see today, the treaties and Indian removals that made this landscape possible was not a sweeping act of universal history but was a complicated, contested, and arguably ongoing process. Treaties did not simply brush aside old ways of life for the progress of white American civilization. In fact, among the earliest treaties were land deals that involved other Indian tribes further east (Oneida, Stockbridge-Munsee, Brothertown). The Menominee as well as the four Ojibwe bands in northern Wisconsin resisted removal and negotiated successfully for tribal land in their homelands as well as rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the lands they had ceded. Others like the Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, and St. Croix and Pokoagon bands of Ojibwe were forced to remove from the state but continually returned and eventually established tribal lands in Wisconsin. After some general remarks about what treaties are, I will follow both the history of treaty-making for Indian tribes and bands in what became the state of Wisconsin, and try to place them within the context of early settler encroachment which moved illegally into lead-rich lands reserved by treaties (in particular, the Ho-Chunk)—those miners who would dig holes in the hillsides, earning the nickname “Badgers.”

What Are Treaties? How Do They Relate to the U.S. Constitution?

Treaties were the legal mechanism by which American government sought to remove Indian peoples from lands east of the Mississippi River (hence, the use of the term “ethnic cleansing”). The history of Euro-American and later immigrant settlement in the state of Wisconsin is predicated on treaty diplomacy and enforcement. Treaties between the U.S. and Indian tribes were necessary because Indian groups, as defined by the Constitution, were treated as “foreign nations” with whom the U.S. had to negotiate and with whom the Federal government had a particular relationship.

US CONSTITUTION

Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 states that "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States ... excluding Indians not taxed."

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that "Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes,” determining that Indian tribes were separate from the federal government, the states, and foreign nations.

Early Treaties Did Not Take Land But Secured Peace after the War of 1812

The destabilization and devastation that treaties and removal would have on Indian country in the region cannot be overstated. And yet, treaties with Indian tribes in Wisconsin after the War of 1812 were not initially about separating Indian tribes from their land claims. Instead, treaties like those between the U.S. and the Ho-Chunk in 1816 and between the U.S. and Menominee in 1817 were first used to secure peaceful relations with the American Indian bands and tribes who had generally sided with the British in the late conflict.

Another Early Treaty Involved Menominee, Ho-Chunk, and "New York Indians"

Curiously enough, some of the first treaties with Wisconsin Indian nations involved lands for the settlement of other Indian groups. In spite of their Christian conversation and cultural assimilation to English conceptions of property the Oneida, Brothertown, and Stockbridge-Munsee faced pressures to remove further west. The so-called “New York Indians” approached the Menominee and Ho-Chunk in 1821 about obtaining land along Lake Michigan near Green Bay for their communities.

Treaties of 1821 and 1822

Menominee and Ho-Chunk sold lands to emigrating New York Indian tribes. In 1821, the land exchanged was 860,000 acres. The 1822 treaty was 6.72 million acres, almost the entire Wisconsin shoreline of Lake Michigan. The Menominee and Ho-Chunk protested these treaties as agreements between parties without authority to make such agreements on the tribe’s behalf. They also protested that they understood the treaties to provide for land upon which the New York Indians to reside on, not to purchase or transfer ownership.

Treaty of 1827, Treaty at Little Lake Butte des Mortes

Opportunity to resolve conflict but New York Indians do not send delegates. A Federal commission was established to settle the issue, providing a recommendation to the President whose decision on the matter was binding. The Ho-Chunk and Menominee disputed the findings and President John Quincy Adams was reluctant to act.

Treaty of 1831/32

In 1831, a final attempt to procure lands for the New York tribes from the Menominee and Ho-Chunk commenced in Washington, D.C. In the end, only the Menominee ceded lands, including a half-million acres near Green Bay. A final provision reserved their right to hunt and fish on the ceded lands until the government sold the land to Whites. The most important provision in the 1831 Treaty was the cession of 500,000 acres near Green Bay for the New York Indians. When the Senate ratified the first 1831 treaty, they changed the specified boundaries so the New York Indians received better land. The cession still amounted to 500,000 acres, but the Menominee rejected the new boundaries, thus creating the need for a third compromise treaty in 1832. The Menominee relented and approved the boundaries established by the Senate.

The Lead Rush on Indian Country Necessitated Treaties

As much as we might associate Wisconsin with farmland, the foundation of Euro-American settlement was in the lead-rich mineral lands in the southwestern corner of the state. Lead was used for a variety of purposes in the early-nineteenth century (pewter, pipes, weights, paint and ammunition). Following the War of 1812, Euro-American miners (often traveling north from St. Louis up the Mississippi River) traveled to the region near Dubuque to dig for lead ore. Rather than building shelters, many miners who moved to the region burrowed holes in the hillsides, earning the nickname “Badgers.”

Native Peoples Had Mined Lead Since Before Europeans Arrived

Native peoples had mined and traded lead from this region since before Europeans arrived in North America. French traded for lead in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the French withdrew from the region following the Seven Years War, Native peoples kept knowledge of these lead deposits a secret. The history of treaties between the U.S. and the Indian tribes in this region are entangled in Federal efforts to manage instability created by the Euro-American invasion of Native land. In the 1810s and 1820s, White settlers began to move into the region with increasing frequency, transgressing the territorial boundaries between established by the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825.

Treaty of 1825, First Treaty of Prairie du Chien

Treaty commissioners arrived in Prairie du Chien in the summer of 1825 for a treaty council that gathered together the Sioux, Menominee, Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, Winnebago (Ho-Chunk), the Sac, Fox, and Ioway tribes. This treaty was intended to resolve the intermittent intertribal warfare of the region organized by the Continental Congress as the Northwest Territory following the American Revolution but which remained Indian country. The treaty also established American sovereignty in the region and insisted on boundary lines which were not in keeping with Indian conceptions of land ownership.

Winnebago War, Uprising of 1827

The inaction by U.S. Federal officials in the region to rectify encroachments on Ho-Chunk land led to an uprising against the U.S. by a Ho-Chunk man named Red Bird in the summer of 1827. This was a brief but significant conflict in the summer of 1827 when a Ho-Chunk man named Red Bird led an attack on American settlers, partly owing to the belief that Ho-Chunk prisoners had been handed over to rival tribes as part of U.S. mediation in the region. You might think of checking out a copy of John Hall’s Uncommon Defense or Bethel Saler’s Settler’s Empire for more detailed discussions, but the overall result of this outbreak of violence in the lead country was a paranoia about Indian attacks and an increased resolve that Indian removal was necessary for the security of American settlements in the region.

Ho-Chunk elder, Spoon Decorah/Dekaury, recalled the Ho-Chunk’s general disapproval of the actions of Red Bird:

During what the whites call the Winnebago War, at Prairie du Chien [in 1827], I was living with my people on Little Green Lake. There was among us no general hatred of the whites. Red Bird had some private revenge to satisfy, and murdered the white family at the prairie of his own accord. We were all very sorry. We had no sympathy with him. We felt that he was a bad Indian… There was no feeling among the rest of the tribe, over Red Bird’s conduct, except anger. We willingly gave him up to the whites.

Second and Third Treaties of Prairie du Chien cede land of Council of Three Fires, Ho-Chunk

The Second and Third treaties at Prairie du Chien were signed in the summer of 1829 as part of the same series of negotiations between the U.S. and Indian leaders with territorial claims in the lead mining region—particularly the Council of the Three Fires and the Ho-Chunk. Following the Winnebago War, the U.S. sought to acquire this territory and remove Indians from the region. The Second Treaty was between the U.S. and The Council of Three Fires, an Anishinaabe alliance also known as the United Nations of Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Indians. Established reservation areas in Illinois (later, removed to Kansas). The Council of Three Fires ceded land in northern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin. The treaty reserved their right to hunt in ceded territory. The Third Treaty was between the U.S. and the Winnebago (now, Ho-Chunk) tribe and was a land cession in roughly the same region which effectively cede the mineral rich lands that settlers had moved into illegally.

Black Hawk War (1832) and the Acceleration of Indian Removal

The Black Hawk War in the spring and summer of 1832 is a monumental episode in the history of Wisconsin landscape insofar as the conflict fueled enough alarm and fear of violence, making Indian removal west of the Mississippi River seem all the more necessary for the safety and security of U.S. territorial expansion in the upper Mississippi River valley. It is considered the last episode of armed Indian resistance to American settlement and sovereignty in the region known as the Old Northwest. The conflict began when a Sauk chief named Black Hawk led a group of around 1,100 Sauk, Meskwaki (Fox), Kickapoo, as well as some Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi warriors, crossed the Mississippi River from the neutral territory in Iowa into Illinois territory formally ceded by the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes to the U.S. with the Treaty of St. Louis of 1804.

The origins of the dispute related to the Treaty of St. Louis (1804)

So what was the fuss? The 1804 treaty was controversial. Black Hawk felt the Sauk chief Quashquame did not have tribal authority to make these land cessions. Like many other tribes in the region, the Sauk sided British against the Americans in the War of 1812. Like the Ho-Chunk, the Sauk also encountered White settlers moving into territory (near present-day Dubuque) reserved for the tribe in the terms of U.S. treaties. In 1828, a year after the so-called “Winnebago War” in lead country, Federal Indian agent Thomas Forsythe urged the Sauk and Meskwaki to prepare to abandon their villages on the Illinois side of the river which were illegal according to the terms of the 1804 treaty. Black Hawk countered that they had never knowingly ceded these lands. In the fall of 1829, the Sauk chief Keokuk agreed to remove west of the Mississippi River and warned that Black Hawk did not have the approval of tribal councils.

Black Hawk War and the “Battle” at Bad Axe

The Black Hawk War involved violent skirmishes between local militias, the U.S. army, and allied Indian warriors (some Ho-Chunk, Dakota, and Menominee) as they pursued Black Hawk’s band northeast into Illinois, up the Rock River, and then west across southern Wisconsin. Battles involved as many as a few hundred on each side to as few as a dozen. The war ended at the so-called “Battle” of Bad Axe—with Black Hawk’s starving party (many of which were women and children) attempting to flee back across the Mississippi River. More than half of the remaining 500 Indians in Black Hawk’s band were killed trying to swim across the river, with 110 drowning. The U.S. lost 14 men. Black Hawk fled north with remaining followers to seek refuge with the Ojibwe but were convinced by Ho-Chunk near present-day Tomah to surrender to the Americans.

The Marshall Trilogy

Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), holding that private citizens could not purchase lands from Native Americans.

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), holding the Cherokee nation dependent, with relationship to the United States like that of a "ward to its guardian".

Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which laid out the relationship between tribes and the state and federal governments, stating that the federal government was the sole authority to deal with Indian nations.

In addition to the alarm caused by the Black Hawk war and the Marshall rulings establishing the terms of the relationships between tribal nations, states, and the Federal government, Indian country was already imperiled by Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act (1830), legislation which consolidated and formalized U.S. Indian policy of making treaties to remove Indians in the Southeastern states (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida) to lands west of the Mississippi River.

Pressures for Indians to remove west of the Miss. River increased following the Black Hawk War.

The Ho-Chunk ceded the remainder of their land in Wisconsin in 1832 and 1837 treaties with the U.S. The Potawatomi relinquished their lands in Wisconsin in the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, the dispersal of the Potawatomi bands as far south as Mexico and north into Canada. A treaty between the Menominee and the U.S. in 1836, known as the Treaty of the Cedars, gave the U.S. territory along the north shoreline of Green Bay up to and beyond the present-day boundary to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Further north, the U.S. signed treaties with Ojibwe bands around Lake Superior. The Ojibwe of Wisconsin signed three major land cession treaties with the United States in 1837, 1842, and 1854, ceding most of their homeland to the U.S.

American Indian Tribes in Wisconsin Resisted Removal in Different Ways

Even amidst the flurry of tribal land cessions in the quarter-century following the Black Hawk War, Wisconsin tribes successfully resisted Indian removal policy and established reservations in or near their homelands.

Ojibwe treaties secure reservations in their homeland

The eight Ojibwe bands in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the upper peninsula of Michigan were able to leverage the necessity for unanimous consent to establish reservations in their homelands. The 1854 treaties created reservations for four Ojibwe bands in the Wisconsin.

Menominee resist removal, establish reservation in homeland

The Menominee are another example. The Menominee nominally agreed to a Treaty in 1848, “Treaty of Lake Poygan,” which ceded all Menominee land in Wisconsin, promised the Menominee a new homeland of 600,000 acres in Minnesota, and allowed the Menominee two years before their removal. The two-year period allowed for Menominee removal came and went. Eleven chiefs led by Oshkosh, Grand Chief of the Menominee, visited the proposed Crow Wing country in Minnesota but refused to remove the tribe from Wisconsin, arguing that the it was “hostile country” and that the government had pressured them to sell their lands in the 1848 treaty. The tribe petitioned the U.S. government; a Menominee delegation of eight chiefs met with President Millard Fillmore, who sympathized with their situation and granted them a temporary reservation in 1852 on the Wolf River. The Treaty of 1854 established the Menominee reservation at it’s present location, with a treaty in 1856 providing 46,000 acres (at 6 cents an acre) of southwestern corner of their reservation to the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe who were facing removal from Wisconsin without such a deal.

Ho-Chunk return, eventually obtain homesteads after removal

Still another example of resistance during the era of treaties and removal was simply to return to live in the state without a proper reservation. As you can see in this map, the Ho-Chunk were forced to move to a variety of reservations west of the Mississippi River before securing a reservation near Omaha, Nebraska in 1865. The Ho-Chunk in Wisconsin today are descendants of the so-called “renegade bands” that chose to return to Wisconsin after their removal. When the Federal government extended homestead act for Indians in 1874, Ho-Chunk members were able to purchase homestead lands of up to 80-acres. The history of the Forest County Potawatomi is also tied to lands purchased as homesteads in 1884.

Nevertheless, land cessions were devastating to Native life in Wisconsin, the United States

I should not overstate the successes of American Indians in these treaty negotiations with the U.S., nor skim over the trauma which came with the separation of Indian tribes from their homelands in Wisconsin—traumas that are intergenerational and which Indian nations deal with today. Treaties with the U.S. were not balanced negotiations but often surrounded by pressures from settlers, threats of forceful dispossession, and controversy over the terms of the agreement (tenancy versus sale) and the authority of tribal representatives to represent their nations.

Land Allotment and Assimilation Policy

After treaties had been made and reservations established, the U.S. Federal government began a forceful and devasting campaign of assimilation centered on replacing collective tribal possession of land into conceptions of private, individualized land ownership. The General Indian Land Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, was a piece of Federal legislation passed in 1887 that divided tribally (that is, collectively) owned lands into individual plots of 160 acres for heads of families, 80 for each single adult, and 40 for each person under eighteen years old. These lands could not be sold for twenty-five years and all tribal land remaining after parcels were allotted was considered “surplus” and open to sale to non-Indians. Between 1887 and 1934, reservation land was reduced from 150 million acres to 50 million acres.

The Dawes Act in Wisconsin

For Indian tribes with reservation lands, the Dawes Act amounted to another land grab by legislative and legal means—a way to further dispossess Indian tribes of reservation lands by implementing European conceptions of private property in order to reduce tribal land holdings and force Indians to adopt the ways of the “white man.” In Wisconsin, land allotment policy reduced tribal land holdings by half (75% loss national average). The Menominee reservation, the largest in the state, avoided allotment because the sustained-yield system of lumbering required an undivided land base. The Oneida would lose nearly all of their tribal lands due to allotment policy. The Stockbridge reservation was eliminated through a means.

Assimilation policy at Off-Reservation Boarding Schools

Land allotment policy was paralleled by off-reservation boarding schools. The goals Indian education was, in the words of Richard H. Pratt the superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, to “kill the Indian to save the man.” Native peoples in off-reservation boarding schools were separated from their parents and put through a curriculum meant to replace their cultures. It required Indians to abandon their tribal cultures—Native languages, spiritual values, forms of cultural expression, and instead adopt the religiosity, dress, language, music, and ways of thinking that were amenable to property ownership, concepts of individualism, to learn to love the fixed agricultural household. And as you can see in the picture of the Carlisle Indian band on the right, music was an audible front of this assimilation policy.

Society of American Indians and the Progressive Era

The Society of American Indians (formed in Columbus Ohio in 1911) was organized by fifty Native professionals who advocated not only for assimilation but also for Indian civil rights, health, education, and local governance. Two prominent members in that Progressive organization with connections to Native Wisconsin are the world renown band leader of the Carlisle Indian School, the Oneida man Dennison Wheelock, as well as Ho-Chunk Henry Roe Cloud, who became the first full-blooded Indian to attend Yale University (graduating with an MA in 1914).

Tourism at the Dells and Ho-Chunk Return to the Wisconsin River

Now, if we think about the Ho-Chunk, we can see just how distinct each tribes experience with the Wisconsin landscape after removal and the creation of reservations can be. The did not experience land allotment per se because they did not have a reservation in Wisconsin. Many of you will recognize a town on the Wisconsin River that we call Wisconsin Dells. These days, it’s like the indoor waterpark capitol of North America. And you may have even taken a duck boat tours on the Wisconsin River. But you might not know that Ho-Chunk Indians and Indian music and dance performances (dramatic pageant shows) for white audiences was a central part of the Dells tourism economy for over a century before the transformation of the town into an indoor waterscape in the last two or three decades.

Ho-Chunk Return and the Nature Tourism Economy of the Dells

By the late-nineteenth century, the Ho-Chunk—the so-called “rebel band” of the then-called Winnebago tribe—had continually returned to their homelands, some of whom purchased homesteads by special legislation in 1874. But in the summers, the Ho-Chunk established a village on the Wisconsin River near the budding nature-tourism town of Kilbourn City. When the late-nineteenth century photography of H.H. Bennett captured and popularized its scenic beauty (created by the history of glaciation and an ancient Lake Wisconsin that burst through the corridor of the river), it generated enormous interest from middle-class city dwellers looking to escape the city by railroad in the summer and rejuvenate themselves in nature. H.H. Bennett also marketed postcards that depicted scenes (sometimes staged) of Ho-Chunk life.

Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial reflects Native labor and public appeal of Native culture

Beginning in the 1910s, Ho-Chunk dancers began to perform on the banks of the river for tourists who were taking river tours on steamboats (as you can see in this postcard), passing the hat for tips thrown down from the spectators on deck eager to have an encounter with Wisconsin Indians that seemed to be one with the rocky landscape. The commercial imperatives of these performances for local white audiences did not go unnoticed, and businessowners in Kilbourn City (which would be renamed Wisconsin Dells in 1931) eventually made agreements that secured the business relation of Ho-Chunk performers and the boat tours of the Dells Boating Company. In 1929, the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial was born. Selling baskets and beadwork, along with these performances, became a key way for the Ho-Chunk—who did not have a reservation in Wisconsin—to practice traditional arts while also marketing their goods to meet white demands for “authenticity.” Multiple generations of Ho-Chunk danced in the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial as the event remained very popular throughout much of the twentieth century.

Federal Recognition with the Indian New Deal

Indian Reorganization Act provides foundation for Federal recognition of Indian nations

Wheeler-Howard Act, also known as the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), reversed decades of assimilation policy and tribal land loss in a forceful attempt to “Americanize” the Indian. Through this legislation referred to as the “Indian New Deal,” the Federal government sought to preserve and promote the cultural traditions and self-government of American Indian nations. Lands were no longer patented in fee simple to individual Indians, and reservation lands sold to non-Indians could now be bought back by tribes. More importantly, the IRA encouraged tribes to form their own governments, providing them a tool to reassert their sovereign powers. It gave tribes the option to organize with their own constitutions and charters.

The Indian New Deal In Wisconsin

After a meeting of tribal leaders in Hayward, Wisconsin, in 1934, all Wisconsin tribes except the Ho-Chunk and Menominee opted to organize tribal governments. The Menominee did not organize owing to the governance structure already in place to acquire the tribal approval of contracts as part of the lumbering enterprise on the Menominee reservation. The Ho-Chunk, who had no reservation in Wisconsin (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska), did not organize for fear that such recognition would undermine future claims to money still owed for past treaties.

Menominee Termination and Restoration

Menominee Termination Act (1954)

Termination was a federal policy revoking a tribe’s right to exercise sovereignty as a federally recognized Indian tribe. Termination was part of a post-World War II political conservatism that sought to dismantle New Deal programs like the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) that supported the preservation of cultural differences and encouraged tribal independence and self-government.

Menominee Restoration Act (1973)

Some Menominee opposed termination and the sale of Menominee lands. The advocacy of Menominee member Ada Deer led to legislation that repealed the termination act of 1954 and restored the Menominee’s sovereign status in the eyes of the Federal government.

Ojibwe Fishing and Hunting Rights Reserved in Treaties

A major decision for the Wisconsin Ojibwe came in 1972, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Bad River and Red Cliff Ojibwe bands had a right to fish in Lake Superior without state regulation. The State could only take "reasonable and necessary" measures to ensure that the lake's fish population was not depleted.

Ojibwe fishing rights and the “Walleye Wars”

In 1973, two members of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of the Ojibwe Nation crossed a reservation boundary on Chief Lake and practiced a traditional form of spear fishing. Because they were fishing out of season, they were convicted of poaching under state law. The Lac Courte Oreilles band entered a legal challenge that the two fishermen were exercising Treaty rights written into the original treaties the Ojibwe bands signed ceding territory in the Lake Superior region, what became northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the upper peninsula of Michigan. Because treaties are agreements made by sovereign nations, this case went to Federal (not State) court. The Lac Courte Oreilles won the case. Their treaty rights to hunt and fish on ceded land was affirmed by the U.S. District Court. The State of Wisconsin—which claims the power to regulate fishing and hunting practices—appealed the ruling. the Seventh Court of Appeals upheld the rights of the Ojibwe. The State of Wisconsin then attempted to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court but the court refused to hear the argument, after which the other five Ojibwe bands joined the legal action. The case was sent back to the U.S. District court with instructions to determine treaty rights and the regulation of the off-reservation resources of these Ojibwe nations. In August of 1987, District Court Judge Barbara Crabb ruled that six Ojibwe nations retain the right to hunt and fish on ceded territories.

Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988

Federal legislation in favor of the sovereign rights of Indian nations would lead to the Indian regulatory act in 1988, which would provide the jurisdictional framework of the casino industry that is one of the most visible parts of the Native Wisconsin landscape today.

Conclusion

Today, Wisconsin is home to more American Indian nations than any other State east of the Mississippi River. Native peoples have endured and adapted—across generations—to life both on and off reservation lands, and throughout the “modern” Wisconsin landscape of cities, suburbs, farm fields, and resort towns. Thinking about Native Wisconsin since these changes is crucial to understanding how and why Native bands and tribes are treated as sovereign nations today. As I hope to illustrate, both land and the cultural values that inform Indian peoples connections to that land are not merely qualities of past land ethics—before the arrival of domineering, commodity-minded Europeans—but are rather Indigenous environmental relationships which are critical to understanding the geography of Wisconsin Indian country today. Ultimately, I hope you walk away from this lecture with a deeper, and more nuanced understanding of the twelve Indian nations that call Wisconsin home.