The second in a three-part series, this episode continues to examine the historical background behind the Lansing Community College Land Acknowledgement statement by considering how the lands formerly held by the Potawatomi and other Anishinaabeg came into the possession of Euro-Americans. With a focus on the changing political, geographic, and economic circumstances following the American War of Independence, this program takes a closer look at what happened after white settlers from the east came to desire indigenous lands in southern Michigan.

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, 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 part two of a three part episode series, I started out by reading the Lansing Community College Land Acknowledgement Statement as I did in the beginning of part one and this three part episode series of Lanstories explores the land of the Indigenous peoples of Michigan, in particular Southern Michigan, where the city of Lansing and therefore Lansing Community College now sit, and the lands in the Mid Michigan region in general.

That area of Michigan that we call Mid Michigan geographically it is not exactly, exactly in the middle of Michigan, strictly speaking, but nonetheless that is what that area is referred to now.

And talking about the middle southern part of the Lower Peninsula and the overarching goal of both Part one, this Part two, and the forthcoming Part three of this episode series is to look at the background behind the reason why the Lansing Community College Land Acknowledgement Statement came into existence.

A major communication document and a major thematic direction that Lansing Community College and other institutions around Michigan are embarking upon and started to somewhat recently in placing the context of land appropriation and where community colleges and universities sit in Michigan within a historical framework.

And so I started out today by reading the Lansing Community College Land Acknowledgement Statement just as I began the first part of this episode doing so.

But to reiterate the point of this episode is not just to examine the history of the Land Acknowledgement Statement, that the statement meaning the words that are contained in there and why those words were created and why they're read out or printed on at or on certain college events or documents has an interesting background behind it, and I will certainly cover that in part three of this episode.

But using that Atlantic acknowledgment statement and its history behind it is really suggestive of of the broader goal to accomplish with this three part series and that is to look at the big picture of why was Indigenous land appropriated and what was the process behind that, trying to look at the background behind the people who lived on that land prior to appropriation and then looking at the after effects of that land appropriation. It's a very broad, sweeping topic, which is why I have devoted three episode portions to examine this.

And for the loyal listeners to this program, you are no doubt identifying a theme by now.

And that is many of the stories we tell on Lanstories are complex and they are just a little bit too complex to be covered within the limits of a single 20 or 30 minute episode. And, and as such, with the glorious wondrous technology at our hands, we can extend our conversation out.

We can extend our exploration of these topics out. And the conversation aspect of this I don't want to lose sight of as well.

Please feel free to contact me, to get ahold of me through my contact details that are on the land Stories section of the LCC Connect homepage.

And very much I look forward to engaging people in conversation related to this very important topic and the other topics, the other stories we tell on Lanstories as well. So we move on then from where we left off on part one of this three part series.

And where we left off was shortly after the United States of America gained its independence from Britain.

The geographic situation at that time with those characteristics in mind, political, economic, geographic understanding, people, geographic understanding meaning where the people were living. It's an interesting picture when we focus on Michigan.

And Michigan actually turns out to be one of the key linchpins, if you will, the deciding geographic moment on the maps that were being drawn with the future of, or as the future of the Indigenous peoples in the United States starts to be considered. And to some extent, Michigan has this important role to play, geographically speaking, in the fate of the Canadian nation too.

The Canadian part of this story is actually vital to the American part of this story. And there are two reasons for that.

That ultimately is a historical narrative that not only spans the decades and the centuries, but it's a historical narrative that is still being written.

Because the indigenous peoples, no matter how hard white Europeans and later Euro Americans, tried to remove and exterminate indigenous peoples not only from the lands of southern Michigan, but but all throughout the United States, that effort failed. And the indigenous cultures survived.

They survived through a degree of attempt at destruction that, unfortunately, we see all around the Americas and other parts of the world, too, as not only an aftermath, but quite frankly, the intent of many colonial endeavors.

And the word colonialism and the concept of colonialism has always had an interesting, really paradoxical role, or I should say definition, in American political thought, American political action. Because the United States, of course, has always viewed itself as a nation that broke free of colonization.

The British were our colonial overlords, as American history tells us, and then we liberated ourselves from that oppressive colonial regime through the American War of Revolution, the Revolutionary War, the War of Independence, and then the aftermath of that was a nation that emerges, that sets itself up as a bulwark against European colonialism in the Americas.

And then ultimately we get to the act of Removal, the act of ethnic cleansing, the act of genocide against indigenous peoples throughout the entire eastern half of what is now the land of the United States of America.

Now, as we're going to see towards the end of this episode, even though that sounds like a very strong almost, well, what's the word I'm looking for here, ridiculous way of describing American behavior towards the indigenous peoples, I can't think of actually more accurate words to use. So let's get to that part of the story here and look at those critical three decades. And this is where the borders come into the story.

The recognition, most importantly, of two things.

The independence of the United States of America, and who would be responsible for paying down the debt that the United States of America had incurred in fighting the war. So essentially, the treaty legitimized America's existence as an independent nation, and it legitimized American debt.

Debt actually turns out to be a very important part of the story, and here's why.

When the United States had its independence recognized, part and parcel of that recognition, as I just mentioned, was the legitimization of American debt.

Meaning before the United States was recognized internationally as a nation independent from Britain, it still had to borrow money to fight for its independence. And the money was borrowed through a fairly complex international system of finance that existed at the time.

But the long and short of it is the US Was in debt, in debt to especially Dutch financiers, but others as well.

And when the war ended and as the United States formed a new government, the US Constitution is ratified not that long after the Treaty of Paris is ratified. So Treaty of Paris comes into existence.

Now, the border issue in the treaty negotiations ultimately was settled with the borders as they are now, between the United States and Canada, for the most part, starting with the western end of Lake Superior and extending all the way to the modern day Canadian border as it traverses across the northern part of the United States. So the borders of Wisconsin, it's a very little maritime border in Lake Superior, right on through Michigan, again, naming states that exist now.

Many of these political entities weren't around yet at this time, and then all the way over through the states of the eastern seaboard.

The French and Indian War was fought ostensibly over that control, that area of land, the Great Lakes, Ohio Valley. But it was fought primarily between the British and their indigenous allies and the French and their indigenous allies.

The French relied on their indigenous allies allies to a greater extent because they were vastly outnumbered by British forces.

Ultimately, the British are able to remove Pontiac and allied forces from many forts they had captured during that uprising, including the British fort recently acquired from the French at the Straits of Mackinac. That would be the fort that we now call Fort Michilimackinac.

And then the recreation and the historical display at Michilimackinac also includes the additions to the fort, the changes to the fort that the British made. Pontiac's uprising and the siege of Fort Michilimackinac has a very large role to play in all of this.

And this proclamation was a set aside, a very large set aside ultimately of land that included all the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region as well as down into what would often become the heart of the American South, Mississippi, Alabama, much of the modern day state of Georgia, Florida, etc.

That the British had to guarantee that they would severely limit, severely restrict settlement onto those lands from white British colonists further east.

Now, the aftermath of this proclamation in there by the aftermath of Pontiac's War really is twofold in terms of the really big things that impacted the the history of indigenous lands. Number one, this is the first time that Europeans and we could group them with Euro Americans.

For the purpose of this consideration here, seriously contemplate the idea of some type of a separation between settlers that would be Europeans who were used to farming land and building things on it.

Think back to the end of the last episode when we gave a consideration of European concepts of land usage and who had the right to be on it and who didn't and how that compared to indigenous thoughts upon similar matters. And then also it set forth the idea that going forward, indigenous peoples had to be negotiated with. They couldn't simply be conquered.

That is every bit as important as the idea of having a separation of lands that indigenous peoples shall occupy and lands that Euro Americans shall occupy.

And when the United States comes into existence, these concepts, separation and negotiation, they form the basis of how the United States looked at its Indian policy.

And what happens during those 30 years is that American settlers set their eyes on the lands of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley areas.

And those laws created a very complex and ultimately long term process by which the lands of the Great Lakes region would be settled and the lands would be sold.

And the process of settling the land and selling the land would ultimately lead to political organization, thereby the United States expanding its continental empire westward.

And this ceded meaning handed over to the United States federal government much of what is now the modern state, state of Ohio.

And land cession treaties, it was understood at the time, were required as a part of this long term process of getting hold of opening for settlement all of this land of the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley region.

And the reason for that is because the United States Constitution has a clause in it that stipulates the indigenous tribes, referred to in the Constitution as the several tribes, are to be negotiated with as Congress would negotiate and ultimately ratify or vote down treaties with other nations.

And that is ultimately where we will arrive at the point of Indian removals, as they were called at the time. And I will reiterate a point I made a few moments ago.

It has oftentimes been remarked upon by various scholars and commentators and other people that look at this period of American history, that the United States, in forcing indigenous peoples like the Potawatomi off their land, in organizing massive removals of entire ethnicities of people, such as the Potawatomi Removal, such as what was done with the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Cree, the Seminole, in what has become known to history as the Trail of Tears, constitutes ethnic cleansing or it constitutes genocide.

The distinguishing factor between one term or the other seems to be the intent of those seeking to somehow remove, either by moving the people to another geographic location, that would be ethnic cleansing, or outright extermination of people through mass murder. That would be genocide.

And at the same time, there are others who look at the Indian removals in the United States, such as the Potawatomi, as something that shouldn't be looked at as genocide or ethnic cleansing.

And the evidence, if you will, given for those who favor that definitely less severe terminology usage tends to be that the government they argue that set forth the removals was more interested in moving people off through land than it was killing them.

And second of all, if ethnic cleansing or genocide, the argument goes, are intended to be ways of forever removing all aspects of individuals off of one area of land so that it could be populated by another group or another culture, then what the United States government did fell short of that goal. Because Indigenous peoples survive.

In my mind, this is an exercise in arguing over words, and in doing so we lose track of what actually happened and why.

It's important to know what happened, and as important as it is to ensure the terminology is adequate to the description of the event being portrayed, nonetheless, the important fact of the matter is looking at, in our case here for this story, what happened to the Potawatomi, the other Indigenous peoples of Michigan, but in particular those that lived in the lands that Lansing Community College now sits on as the focus of this episode. We shall do that and leave that discussion over terminology with the following in mind.

Describing how something happened is very important in understanding what happened.

However, no matter what words one uses to either try to suppress the transmission of knowledge going forward or try to obfuscate what actually happened will never render the acquisition of such knowledge to be an impossible goal to achieve, so long as there are people out there who seek to find that information, who understand its importance and relevancy, and share what they have found with others.

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.