The first in a three-part series, this episode examines life in Mid-Michigan for the indigenous Anishinaabeg. Part one explores life in the Great Lakes region millennia ago and the cultural differences between the Anishinaabeg and later European colonizers. Content includes a focus on what is known and not-known of the centuries of human existence that pre-date European and Euro-American interest in the region.

Website: LCC History Degrees & Programs

Keywords: Anishinaabeg, Three-Fires People, Ojibway, Odawa, Potawatomi, Indigenous America, Indigenous Michigan, Pre-Contact, Archaeology, Neolithic, Mid-Michigan, Lansing History, Michigan History, Prehistoric, Land Use, Land Appropriation, Land Acknowledgement, Lansing Community College, Ingham County, Michigan

From Lansing Community College, this is LCC Connect and this is Lanstories with me, David Siwik. Each episode explores a different topic, such as the people, business, neighborhoods, communities, buildings, and other phenomena that make up the history of our college and our region. We tell stories, and in doing so, we connect the past to the present.

In this episode of Lanstories, we're going to look at the history behind the that land acknowledgement statement. And what I mean by that is not just the statement itself.

We're not going to only look at the reason why that statement was put recently into Lansing Community College Communications. We're going to look at the reason why that statement came into existence to begin with.

And that's a broad story that's going to take us back hundreds of years to a time before Lansing Community College existed, to a time before the city of Lansing existed, to a time before the folks who would come to name this area, Ingham County, Lansing, ever lived here.

And what, of course we're talking about is the history of the indigenous peoples of this area who are mentioned in that land acknowledgment statement the Three Fires Confederacy, the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. And this is a story that is told in many ways, although ways that aren't necessarily inclusive of everything that happened.

Well, I remember two things clearly about the lessons that we were taught.

The folks who came here and the folks that lived here, here being in Michigan before the folks that came here, those would be the white Euro Americans. And those two things were as follows. Number one, there were people that lived here before Europeans got here, and they were called Indians.

The second thing I learned about those folks is that they were really nice. They gave the Europeans lots of stuff, especially food like turkey and corn.

And that is why we get a Thursday in November off of school, so we can eat turkey and corn with our mom and dad and grandpa and grandpa. And that is called Thanksgiving. And those really nice Indians gave those really nice pilgrims who wore the funny hats, the corn and the turkey.

And that is how America came to be founded. Now, you may be thinking, wow, that sounds kind of like a story I've been told.

And you may also be thinking, boy, that sounds pretty simple, that there had to have been more to the story than that. And, well, there was.

And this episode isn't about the first Thanksgiving, so I care not to dwell too much further upon that, rather than mentioning it in the context of. This is really the extent of what I was taught when I was a little kid about, quote, unquote, Indians, about the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

And I suspect that I'm not the only child growing up in Michigan in the United States of America back in the early 80s, sitting in an elementary classroom learning about this for the first time. I suspect this is something that happened elsewhere around the United States and has some form of it now.

When I got a bit older is when I learned that there was a much more complex story of who lived in Michigan before Europeans arrived and what that arrival of Europeans entailed. And to bookend my learning of this would not really be possible because I'm still learning much about this, and I hope you are too.

One should never close his learning off in life after all.

To do so, I think, would be to limit the great opportunity that we have at understanding this fascinating place we inhabit called Planet Earth and our fellow humanity writ large.

What we know about this area, we, meaning collective humanity, those have chosen to study the subject, those have stumbled upon evidence, sometimes quite accidentally, is limited when one considers that there are thousands of years of humanity having lived in Michigan, the southern part of Michigan specifically, as the focus today of this episode, that we just don't know about, about, I don't know, 10, 11, 12 years ago, somewhere around there. I was on a. On an 80 foot boat, one might call it a ship about, I don't know, 15 miles or so offshore on Lake Huron, northern part of Lake Huron.

And I was on the ship as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities workshop that I took part in over the course of a couple weeks in the summer. And the purpose of that workshop was to examine the history of shipwrecks along the Great Lakes.

And maybe in a future episode I will share with you some of those stories because they're quite fascinating. But for now I'm going to share with you part of this workshop I took part in that didn't have anything to do with shipwrecks.

We were on a ship that had a scientist on board who had a remote operated vehicle, an rov, which is basically a little robot that's about the size of a. One of those little mini beer kegs you can buy in the store that holds about five liters of beer.

And it has a camera on it, it's tethered to a control device that the operator operates in our case on the deck of the ship. And then it has nice television screen that it hooks up to.

We had about a, I don't know, 30 inch monitor on board the ship that the images, the remote operated vehicle beamed through its tether, the 250ft of water or so we were in up to that lovely television screen sitting on the deck of the ship. And we were looking at a shipwreck that was sitting in that part of Lake Huron, the bottom of it.

And I happened to discuss with the gentleman who brought the ROV with him what his research interests were. I figured it wasn't only shipwrecks because you can look at a lot of stuff with ROVs and as it turns out, it wasn't.

He shared with me a story of a research project that he became aware of somewhat recently.

And I think it was being conducted by the University of Michigan at the time that discovered what scientists believed to be, and later on very much affirmed were caribou hunting grounds.

Basically giant gauntlets that were set up to force caribou into a, basically a tunnel, a gauntlet that had been set up to direct them into one point where the ancient hunters would force them through via spooking them into a stampede. And then the hunters at the other end of the gauntlet would kill their prey and have a feast on caribou.

And I was fascinated to learn about the discovery of this because it, it suggested that there were people hunting caribou in what is now called the Great Lakes region of North America thousands of years ago.

In order for these caribou hunting grounds to have been built by humans, they would had to have been there around eight or 9,000 years ago, because that was the last time that Lake Huron had a water level that was low enough that those hunting grounds would have been on land. Obviously people did not dive hundreds of feet below the water thousands of years ago and hunt caribou down there. That would have been preposterous.

So we know through the discovery of these ancient caribou hunting grounds, through discovery, some other archaeological sites that are not under Lake Huron, Such as the Gaines site near Flint, that there have been people living in Michigan for thousands of years, Long before Europeans ever set eyes on this land. Now it's good to know that. But what do we know about those people who lived here at the time?

Well, that unfortunately is answered by saying not as much as we would like to.

The biggest challenge that's always existed in studying the pre European peoples who lived in Michigan is that at the time they did not have the type of written language that Europeans possessed. And the absence of that type of written language has therefore made made it hard to study them.

Because civilization societies that leave writing behind are usually a lot easier to study their thoughts, their ideas, their day to day practices because, well, they wrote something down about them. And if we can read their writing, Writing is an incredible tool to get into the mind of the individual who created said documentation.

And their writing was descriptive, but extremely biased as we would say nowadays. The Jesuits were on a mission to convert the native peoples to Christianity.

And they believed that the evidence that they could find within those indigenous peoples cultures, that they were either heathens in believing in false gods or idols, or they were in some way savage and barbaric, would be evidence that would further justify the sort of, by any means necessary conversion of those folks to Christianity that certain Jesuits were motivated towards. So those sources aren't always as helpful as one might think.

But I don't want to jump completely over that several thousands of years of history between when those ancient caribou hunting grounds were put down and when the Jesuits arrive here in Michigan. Because there's obviously a lot of time to pass in between. And what we know about that time comes from the indigenous sources themselves.

And the Anishinaabeg are the three firest people that are mentioned in the Lansing Community College land acknowledgement Statement that I begin this episode by reading out.

And the Anishinaabeg lived in Michigan at the time of the arrival of Europeans and likely lived here for centuries, if not longer, prior to the arrival of Europeans.

The evidence of this comes in the form of the traditional history of the Anishinaabeg, and it also comes in the anthropological and historical studies that have been conducted of the ancient Americas over the last centuries, since many Europeans and their descendants have lived here.

And the ancient history of the Anishinaabeg is one of migration, migration to the Great Lakes region from lands along the eastern seaboard of North America and the Mi' kmaq indigenous peoples who live in the northeastern part of the United States and into the maritime provinces of Canada. They are ethnically related to the Anishinaabeg. And this is great evidence.

It's very strong evidence that shows us that indeed there is a strong connection between the Great Lakes indigenous Americans and those of the northeast.

When Europeans arrived into the Americas, the continent was populated quite extensively, but not evenly distributed in terms of where the people lived.

So the west coast of North America was very densely populated relative to the, say, desert southwest, where, because of the lack of resources, population densities were not nearly as heavy.

And then in the eastern part of North America, what anthropologists years ago dubbed the eastern woodlands, Population densities varied primarily based on the availability of resources as well.

And this part of North America, the Great Lakes region, had a population density that was fairly sparse, but also varied quite greatly in subsistence patterns. So we think of the indigenous peoples of this part of the Americas as being, quote, unquote, hunter gatherers.

As the title suggests, this is an old, but still widely used anthropological term that suggests that people made their living off hunting and gathering.

And the hunter gatherer lifestyle is suggested by anthropologists and historians to be one that involved fairly sparsely populated regions, because hunter gatherers, it was believed, needed great stretches of land to be able to support themselves off wild game and wild plants. Now, even that terminology, Game. Game is a.

Is a very Eurocentric term, actually, because it suggests that to take an animal in the wild to eat, as opposed to slaughtering livestock, is some type of a sport activity.

And that would be because in medieval Europe, which is where this terminology gains popularity, those who hunted wild game were indeed usually wealthy noblemen engaged in some sort of recreation. So that terminology aside, the picture of life here in this part of the Americas at the.

In a way that was easily recognized. Indigenous societies were very poorly understood by Europeans when they arrived here.

And even the Jesuit priests, who actually made a more concerted effort to understand the indigenous societies, Effort that they made because they believed they had to get to know the people before they could convert them to Christianity, even they, in the end, exhibited a very poor understanding of what was actually going on.

It was very easily recognized. You had the monarchy and the noble families who owned all the land that existed at the top of the hierarchy.

And then you had the church, the catholic church, which essentially functioned as a nobility in and of itself, and a very wealthy one at that. It owned lots of land in France.

Bishops had a great degree of political and economic power in France, so they were very easily recognizable as a nobility within themselves. And then you had the rest of society who worked the land, the nobility owned. And they were clearly at a lower point in the social hierarchy.

And that social order that existed prior that revolution, the one I am describing, Becomes known as the ancien regime, the old ruling order of France.

Now, the ancien regime produced a culture, therefore, that, when finding itself on the shores of the Americas, did not recognize or relate to the social orders that were here.

And land, land usage, land ownership, subsistence ways of living, Turn out to be probably one of the greatest aspects of indigenous life that Europeans found very, very difficult to understand. Certainly the case with the French here in Michigan.

Rigid in the sense that when we're talking about gender roles, Talking about men and women, and what men and women do, are expected to do and are believed to do by their very nature in society. And gender roles are oftentimes tied closely into what people think of children, too, and how children are raised.

And this would be a third sort of the major differences between the societies that the French Discovered when they came into Michigan Compared to what they were used to back in Europe.

They almost most certainly did.

And we know that from some of the very touching and emotional writings that people left behind of their children, and including those that exhibited a great despair over the society that the children were born into, People felt like they really had no choice but to raise the children to be sort of mini adults. And as soon as they were old enough to walk and work out in the fields for long enough, well, they did.

And that was really the life that children had. It wasn't a world that was very different from adults and children and adults worked side by side one another throughout their lives.

Now, when Europeans arrived in the Americas and when they arrived in Michigan, Children, in some ways, did have one common behavioral characteristic. The Europeans could recognize it was actually that it was the fact that they were side by side adults.

And Europeans could recognize as well that the anishinaabeg raised their children.

Whether the French realized or not that they were doing it is, you know, perhaps not necessarily clear either, but they were raised with an expectation of gender roles being fulfilled.

So boys were raised by men, Girls were raised by women, not exclusively, but in order for boys to be able to grow up and do what men were expected to do in indigenous societies, they were taught by men to do what men did. And men were recognized by Europeans, who wrote about them anyways, as primarily hunting.

In terms of their role in society, Women were where agriculture was practiced, actually were very much the farmers, and they raised girls accordingly to work the fields. Now, agriculture wasn't as practiced Nearly as prominently here in Michigan as it was in other parts of the Americas prior to the arrival Europeans.

But the Potawatomi, those folks who lived in what is now Lansing, Ingham county Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Were certainly more extensive agriculturalists Than the odawa and the Ojibwe who lived further north.

It left good soil south of the retreat and not as good a soil north of the retreating line. So where that moraine ended up forming. So the practice of agriculture, again limited compared to other parts of the Americas.

But in the southern part of Michigan, the Pottawatomie did farm. They didn't farm as extensively as other agricultural communities societies did, but it did encompass a fairly significant part of their diet.

And that's actually a very important thing to keep in mind, because when the very first substantial wave of white settlers crossed the Appalachian Mountains and set their eyes on the lands in this part of what would become the United States, farming is what was on their mind. And one of the entire justifications for taking indigenous lands was always this idea that indigenous peoples didn't use their land.

Yes, that is, you just heard Europeans and later white Americans oftentimes justified the seizure of Indian lands of indigenous peoples lands by claiming that the indigenous peoples didn't use their land, they lived on it, but they didn't use it.

And land usage in the eyes of Europeans, be that the French, but especially the British, when we're talking in the colonial context of the middle part of the Americas, then later on the Americans, after the United States gained its independence from Britain, that mindset that existed amongst those people at the time with regards to land was land was only used if it was farmed or if it was built upon.

So a stretch of land that had farms on it, a stretch of land that had a city built on it, a stretch of land that had a port built, if it was coastal land, for example, that was land that was being used.

And the usage of land in the European and later the American mindset of property ownership was absolutely vital in determining whether or not one could claim ownership.

Meaning if in the eyes of European property law and later American property law, and this is actually rooted back in ancient Rome, if land wasn't used, even the person who occupied that land didn't have a claimant of ownership. Land had to be used in order for it to be properly claimed to be owned.

And this is going to be a major justification that the United States again is going to use when it comes to appropriation of indigenous lands.

And that's where we're going to leave off this episode, Part one of a three part series on Indigenous lands in Michigan and where, when, why and how the land of Michigan, and in particular the southern part of Michigan where Lansing Community College now sits, came to be appropriated and taken from the Indigenous peoples and thereby fallen in the hands of others. Next episode we will therefore continue looking at Indigenous Mid Michigan.

You've been listening to Lanstories with me, David Siwik. For more information on this program and to stream past episodes, visit LCCconnect.org. LCC Connect is the official home of the voices, vibes and vision of Lansing Community College, offering hours of original and exciting programming. Hosted by faculty, staff and community members, LCC Connect explores our college's work in the community, important topics in higher education, and our vision for the future. Catch the vibe on 89.7 FM or online at LCCconnect.org. Until next time, remember, keep telling good stories.