The third in a three-part series, this episode concludes our look at the historical background behind the Lansing Community College Land Acknowledgement statement. Part three explores how the lands formerly held by the Potawatomi and other Anishinaabeg came into the possession of Euro-Americans, with a focus on tribal sovereignty, land cession treaties and the forced removal of indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands.

Keywords: Anishinaabeg, Three-Fires People, Ojibway, Odawa, Potawatomi, Indigenous America, Indigenous Michigan, Land Cessions, Treaties, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, Trail of Tears, Mid-Michigan, 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.

To begin this episode, I will read the Lansing Community College Land Acknowledgement Statement as I have in Part one and Part two of our look at the Indigenous lands of Mid Michigan and how those lands came to be dispossessed from the original inhabitants of them and the Lansing Community College Land Acknowledgement Statement is as follows.

Lansing Community College occupies the ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg 3 fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples.

If you can imagine looking at a

map of the Lower Peninsula Michigan and take the middle part of that peninsula and draw a line roughly from just south of bit south of Lansing pretty close to where I 94 runs nowadays and imagine that line being bisected by Jackson and protruding about 40 miles each way.

So in total about an 80 mile long line running roughly congruent to the where I94 runs through that part of Michigan now and then from the left end of that line drawing a northerly but veering to the east so northeast direction line pretty much straight up all the way up to near where the Michigan town of Atlanta is located nowadays and then from there over to Lake Huron.

From the other end of that 80 mile line in the southern part of the Lower Peninsula, the land cession that was made as a result of the Druidius Saginaw runs roughly about to form again the other boundary about another 60, 50 or 60 miles or so north and then from there veering in a about a 45 degree angle over to Lake Huron where it runs into the shore right about the northern part of the Thumb and all the area in between, if you will, those lines. That was the land cession made by the Treaty of Saginaw.

The Treaty of Saginaw was a very large session when one considers the overall size of the Lower Peninsula.

And it was significant because it was one of the earlier treaties that was negotiated after the United States federal government changed the way that it had tried to include various stipulations in land cession treaties. And we have to take a little bit of a step back here now.

And for those of you who haven't listened to part one and part two of this episode, I strongly encourage you to do so because I they provide much of the background information to where we are beginning our exploration now in this Part three and in the earlier episodes of this series, we discussed why Congress had to make land session treaties. And a land cession treaty is exactly as the title suggests.

It is a treaty between the United States federal government and an UN Indigenous community. The Constitution refers to them as Indian tribes. So for legal purposes, we will use that term here.

And it all comes down to Article 1, Section 8 in the US Constitution, where in Article 1, the Constitution spells out how Congress will be made up and what its powers will be.

And one of the powers that the Constitution delegates to Congress is to, quote, regulate foreign commerce with foreign nations and among the several states and with the Indian tribes. And that has historically been interpreted to mean that Indian tribes have this curious.

And by curious, I'm really referring to the legal arrangement or the legal definition that this clause in the Constitution provides for Indian tribes of somewhere between a completely independent nation and what the individual states in the United States have when it comes to sovereignty.

And sovereignty in a legal sense is very much the key term, the key concept here. Sovereignty could be defined as essentially the independence of a nation or a political body.

If we choose to look at a nation as a political body, meaning a sovereign nation, a sovereign people in a republic, the sovereignty ultimately lies with the people, is a entity, a body politic, a group of people that is clearly defined in geography. So a sovereign nation has recognized borders.

When the United States gained its independence from the United Kingdom from the Revolutionary War, one of the determining factors in the treaty that recognized American independence was a recognition of her boundaries, of the boundaries of the United States. And a sovereign nation has the ability to control what happens within those boundaries in regards to the law.

So a sovereign nation has control over its laws. A sovereign nation has control over its boundaries. Now, that's at the very basic sense what sovereignty is.

And of course, within those very Broad, sweeping concepts. There are a multitude of other aspects of what that would mean with a nation that has its sovereignty.

This is related to the land of the Anishinaabeg in Michigan and other Indigenous peoples, because Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution has been interpreted in the past as recognizing a degree of sovereignty within the, as the Constitution words it, Indian tribes.

And so when the United States federal government went about acquiring indigenous lands, the interpretation of Article 1, Section 8 in the United States Constitution meant that the US government had to enter into treaties with the Indian nations. It had to enter into treaties with the tribes, similarly to how it would enter into treaties with another nation.

So by the time we get to the era of land cession treaties, the legal reasoning behind those treaties is very much steeped in that part of the United States Constitution and indeed that same area, the United states Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, it defines other powers or responsibilities of the Congress of the national government, including to regulate commerce between the states.

So that regulation of commerce between the states and the recognition of making treaties with foreign nations as well as the Indian tribes has therefore established this legal relationship that Indian nations have somewhere between a state and the power of the national government or the sovereignty of the national government. When we are talking about the legal understanding of how sovereignty works with regards

to tribal nations stemming from that clause in the US Constitution. After the Constitution is ratified, the federal government makes an effort to gain possession of Indian lands through treaties.

And as I mentioned a moment ago, land cession treaties is what most of these became known as, because the end result was the indigenous peoples ceding meaning to give away, in this case, land to the federal government. So conceptually, it was a legal process.

In actuality, it was both a legal process and a process that involved a considerable degree of person to person negotiation. In the case of Michigan, Lewis Cass is going to come into the picture here.

If you are from Michigan and if you are at all familiar with any Michigan town, including, I suspect, your hometown, you have heard of the name Lewis Cass at one point or another, whether you realize it or not, because many towns in Michigan have a street named after him.

Probably the most famous Cass Road in the state of Michigan would be Cass Avenue in Detroit, which is a street that runs north, south, just to the west of Woodward Avenue in downtown Detroit, and then up into Midtown as well. And there are many other cities in the state of Michigan, small towns, medium sized town cities that have a Cass street or Cass Avenue in them.

So Lewis Cass is an important figure in our story here. And here's why. In negotiating the land cession treaties, the federal government dispatched Indian agents, as they were called.

These were, well, agents, representatives of the federal government into the interior of the United States in the various parts that the federal government sought to negotiate land cession treaties.

Michigan had a rather long period of being a territory before it was admitted into the Union as a state. Now, his lasting legacy as territorial governor was, more than anything, the negotiator, the federal agent of these land session treaties.

And Cass had an idea that would turn out to be both right along the lines of what other white Americans thought at the time with regards to indigenous peoples. And it turned out to be very influential.

Accordingly, that idea, it was an idea, by and large shared by Andrew Jackson, who's going to come into our story in a minute.

And that treaty set forth the large cession of land to the federal government, per the legal understanding of what the Constitution provided in terms of a legal relationship between the tribes and the federal government.

It also was one of the earlier treaties negotiated that set aside land for the indigenous peoples who were losing the majority of their land vis a vis the treaty. And that would turn out to be a major component of future land cession treaties.

And it would also turn out to be a major component, in a very large way, of the future of federal government Indian policy toward indigenous peoples. And all this is going to impact the folks who lived where Lansing Community College is now.

The Treatise of Saginaw and other similar treaties set forth a very small area, relatively speaking, to the very large area, by comparison, of land that was ceded through the land cession treaties as a reserve. And these reserves were very small again, by comparison. But the inclusion of that land in the land cession treaties was a.

What was believed to be a guarantee that, to some extent, the tribal members would be able to remain on their land.

And these land cession treaties included a lot of other things too, including many of them had clauses that allowed indigenous peoples to continue to hunt and fish on lands that they had ceded so long as those lands were not occupied or populated by white settlers. That has been a major area of litigation, actually tribal law recently, relatively recently, between the states, tribes and federal government.

But we'll leave that clause aside for now.

The small reservation areas that were included in many of these land cession treaties are important because the indigenous peoples who signed these land cession treaties. Oftentimes believed that in maintaining a small reservation of area that they could live permanently, or as they understood it, somewhat permanently.

And then at the same time maintaining the rights to hunt and fish on the other lands that were ceded.

Many indigenous peoples believed that this was a situation that while certainly not of their choosing compared to some of the alternatives, they might be able to live with it. But there's a very important caveat to put into there. There's actually two of them.

Number one, the land cession treaties negotiated between the federal government and the indigenous tribes were by no means conducted in the most ethical or scrupulous of matters.

There are many records that exist of land agents from the federal government using outright deceit and making deals with one part of a tribe, but not the other. People like Lewis Cassand, this is the second main point to consider with regards to this.

Had an expressed understanding of indigenous tribes that actually was not very accurate at all. As to how they actually thought of themselves and how they lived.

Cass believed that indigenous peoples lived in a permanent hunter state, to use his terminology.

And in Cass mind, that meant that either because they were incapable or unwilling to abide by the culture of agricultural white American settlers, they were incompatible with living near them.

And as a result, Cass believed that the only way that indigenous peoples could well live anywhere would be to have them separated from the white settlers.

And this is an idea that's going to be adopted by Andrew Jackson, which gets us back to the Potawatomi and the indigenous peoples who lived where white Michigan is now.

After the Treaty of Saginaw is passed, the Potawatomi and others have been isolated onto very small pockets of land by comparison to what they once had access to, with a somewhat nebulous or uncertain guarantee or an understanding anyways, that they maintain the rights to hunt and fish in areas of land that would remain unoccupied by white settlers.

That land had absolutely been in great demand for settlers, mostly from out east, moving into Michigan.

And that same land rush into Michigan was occurring elsewhere in what we now call the Great Lakes and Ohio Valleys, and as well, further south than the Jackson administration. That would be Andrew Jackson. He plays a prominent role in our story from here on out.

The Indian Removal act necessitated that most Indian tribes east of the Mississippi river by a certain date would be removed by force if needed to a giant area of land set aside for them. This is taking the reserve or reservation concept and putting an interesting twist on it.

The state of Oklahoma nowadays has borders that run congruent to this giant area of land that was set aside for the indigenous peoples. And it was called the Indian Territory.

The idea behind the Indian Removal act was that all Indians east of the Mississippi river would be removed on the lands in the Indian Territory, which at the time encompassed again the modern day where the modern day state of Oklahoma is, as well as a little bit of land in, in adjoining Kansas.

The idea behind setting aside a large area of land in the interior of the country to move indigenous peoples onto so they could be kind of forgotten about and the land that they had vacated would therefore be permanently open up to white settlement had been around for a while. Andrew Jackson very much was interested in this idea.

When the act was passed, the federal government did two things, really.

They went in and tried to renegotiate or suggest that they were going to negate the enforcement of or their agreement to abide by the treaties that had been negotiated in the decades prior.

And the second thing it did was it set forth a process by which any Indian tribe who either refused to renegotiate their lancession treaties or was deemed by the federal government to be on an area of land that was just so coveted by white settlers that the federal government was willing to ignore most, if not all, the clauses of the previous lances and treaties they negotiated with them that those people would be removed. And that is exactly what ends up happening to the Potawatomi who lived in the southern part of Michigan.

And that would be the Trail of Tears, as it became known as when the southeastern tribes, who were known at the time as the five cannibalized tribes, that would be the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Cree, and the Seminole, were forced off their lands in that part of the United States and then marched the long distance west, ultimately many dying along the way to their final destination in what we now call Oklahoma. In a bit of Kansas, Same thing happened, though, with Potawatomi. The Potawatomi were forcefully removed.

Their numbers were smaller than the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Seminole, and some others. But the impact of the force removal on a Potawatomi was no less. And in fact, it's really quite staggering when one thinks about it.

The removal of the Potawatomi obviously had

a great impact on the lands that they had once occupied. And the removal of the Potawatomi also is indicative of how this period of Indian removals worked.

And I'm going to harken back to a point of usage of terminology that I used in part one of this three part series of Lanstories episodes. And that terminology is ethnic cleansing or genocide.

The terminology seems very harsh, but when one looks at the attempt that was made to completely cleanse clear lands of an entire ethnicity or multiple ethnicities of people who had lived there for generations, time immemorial, prior to the arrival of white European Americans, I think the term ethnic cleansing at a minimum is an appropriate term to use here.

And when it comes to the Potawatomi, the removal was complicated in the eyes of both the Potawatomi and the United States federal government by two factors. One, some Potawatomi had been deemed to be sufficiently Americanized by having converted to Christianity that they were allowed to stay.

And those Potawatomi peoples who had not converted to Christianity, at least this is the argument that was made by government agents at the time, were those that were slated for removal and those ended up being removed were removed not only because of the fact that some of them had converted Christianity and others hadn't. So in the case of the tribe bands that were removed were those who had not converted to Christianity.

But at the same time, in the years leading up to the Acts of Removal, the Potawatomi in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin there had been Potawatomi that had lived on, recognized by the federal government lands, small reservations that had resulted in the treaties that were made at this time had signed a multitude of treaties with the United States government.

They still maintained, they, meaning The Potawatomi, about 120 reservations or small little parcels of land that had been part of these land cession treaties.

So what happens is the government dispatches more federal agents into the interior of the country and seek to negotiate sort of one more treaty that would sign into law the removal of the Potawatomi. And this becomes the Treaty of Chicago.

It was a very messy treaty making process when it comes to the Treaty of Chicago because some Potawatomi leaders signed the treaty, others didn't.

And ultimately here in Michigan, the treaty was not signed by many of the Potawatomi peoples and those who were believed to be following or under the leadership of a Potawatomi leader by the name of Leopold Pokhagan. They were allowed by the federal government to stay.

And Bukhagan himself became a bit of a spokesperson for the Pottawatomi who were trying to stay in Michigan.

Now ultimately though, the federal government got what it believed to be a sufficient number of Pottawatomi signatures or agreements onto the paper of the Treaty of Chicago.

But by the time the Potawatomi removals are completed and then subsequent treaties are negotiated and then broken again and subsequent removals happen in southern Michigan, there are very few Potawatomi remaining.

It rounded up the Potawatomi who were slave for removal.

It marched them to a staging, well, a series of staging points including one in northern Indiana and and from there the Potawatomi were marched at gunpoint to their relocated lands as they were known as in Kansas. And along the way dozens died.

And the forced removal of the Potawatomi from southern Michigan, therefore is ultimately how the lands that Lansing Community College sits on ended up coming into the possession of non indigenous peoples. And the same is true of lands all around, not only southern Michigan, but much of the eastern United States that were impacted by the removals.

So the Lansing Community College land acknowledgement statement circle back to where this episode.

This series of episodes began seems at its outset to be quite simple and is a short statement that recognizes in word and when spoken that Lansing Community College resides on lands that were the ancestral home of an indigenous peoples who by various matters of course that we have discussed in this episode part three, in this episode part two and in this episode part one ended up being dispossessed of their land. And I will conclude with this episode by once again reading that land acknowledgement statement.

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.