"Our Relations...the Mixed Bloods": Indigenous Transformation and Dispossession in the Western Great Lakes

Larry Nesper

Apr 2021 · State University of New York Press

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In the Great Lakes region of the nineteenth century, "mixed bloods" were a class of people living within changing indigenous communities. As such, they were considered in treaties signed between the tribal nations and the federal government. Larry Nesper focuses on the implementation and long-term effects of the mixed-blood provision of the 1854 treaty with the Chippewa of Wisconsin. That treaty not only ceded lands and created the Ojibwe Indian reservations in the region, it also entitled hundreds of "mixed-bloods belonging to the Chippewas of Lake Superior," as they appear in this treaty, to locate parcels of land in the ceded territories. However, quickly dispossessed of their entitlement, the treaty provision effectively capitalized the first mining companies in Wisconsin, initiating the period of non-renewable resource extraction that changed the demography, ecology, and potential future for the region for both natives and non-natives. With the influx of Euro-Americans onto these lands, conflicts over belonging and difference, as well as community leadership, proliferated on these new reservations well into the twentieth century. This book reveals the tensions between emergent racial ideology and the resilience of kinship that shaped the historical trajectory of regional tribal society to the present.

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Larry Nesper is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights and the coeditor (with Brain Hosmer) of Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building, also published by SUNY Press.