Fires peoples, I use the name “Anishinaabe” (plural “Anishinaabeg”) and employ the modern spelling “Odawa” for the nation that Anglo-Americans spelled “Ottawa.” For the Indians of the Illinois confederacy, I generally use the plural form “Illiniwek” and the singular adjective “Illini.” American treaties generally use “Sac” and “Fox” to refer to the two interrelated nations that I spell “Sauk” and either “Fox” or “Mesquakie.”10
“Native American” and “American Indian” are not names that Indians used for themselves before the nineteenth century, although because one of the first pan-Indian movements on the continent originated in the Lakes country, I found it appropriate to use both labels here. In accordance with modern usage, I have reserved the unmodified term “American” for the citizens, generally white, of the republican empire that fought, traded with, and ultimately displaced so many Native Americans. As part of their larger nation-building project, Revolutionary and Jacksonian-era Americans took for themselves a national label that properly belonged to Indians, thereby engaging in a kind of discursive removal of indigenous Americans. This book cannot easily offer redress for this expropriation, but I hope that my readers will not take it for granted.11
1
Once and Future Civilizations
BEFORE EUROPEANS BEGAN KEEPING WRITTEN ACCOUNTS OF THE region’s history, the millennia of human experience in the Great Lakes country resided in the stories told by early modern Native Americans and the monuments their predecessors left behind. British and American travelers refused to integrate Indians’ stories into their own Judeo-Christian chronology, and they drew entirely misleading conclusions from the thousands of mounds, fortifications, and earthworks that dotted the landscape. A sophisticated civilization, they believed, had once controlled the heart of North America, but barbarian peoples, the ancestors of the early modern Lakes Indians, had wiped it out. Civilization had given way to primitivism, and it remained to the European colonists to rebuild an advanced society.
Modern anthropologists have determined that this self-serving interpretation of precontact history is almost entirely inaccurate. The “civilization” that existed in mid-America was actually several different societies, which flourished at different times in different places. These societies “declined” not when outside invaders overthrew them, but when large-scale settlements like Cahokia exhausted local resources, or when population growth became locally unsustainable, or when political elites lost legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects. Finally, the societies that built the great mounds and earthworks of the past were Indians, whom one could in some cases link to Native peoples (like the Ho-Chunks and Shawnees) who still lived in the region when the first French explorers arrived. The post-Columbian Lakes Indians all retained, moreover, the means if not the inclination to rebuild the monuments and cities of their past: they still practiced high-yield agriculture, built large and durable towns, and conducted long-distance trade for exotic goods. That they did not create a new mound-builder culture after 1600 one may blame on the actual foreign barbarians who entered and disrupted the region: the Europeans.
Lakes Indian history before 1600 was longer and more complicated than European invaders understood. Monumental societies like the Hopewell culture and the Mississippian settlements rose and fell, but beneath this highly visible superstructure of cyclical change, pre-Columbian Indians had children, built trading networks, adopted new forms of production like maize agriculture, and told stories that made sense of their people’s place in the world. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europeans did not understand this underlying history, but fortunately modern scholars and Native peoples have been able to explain much of it.
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The Indians of the Great Lakes region traditionally did not assign a specific date to their peoples’ arrival in America. Instead, their storytellers asserted that their ancestors had come to their contact-era homelands sometime in the distant past, usually from an otherworldly place of origin, often just as those homelands were coming into physical existence. The Hurons and Iroquois traced their descent from the Sky Woman (known to the Hurons as Aataentsic), who after falling from heaven birthed the first members of the human race on an island supported by a totemic Turtle. The Anishinaabeg told a similar story: angry manitous (spirits) destroyed their ancestors in a great flood, and the sole human survivor built an island refuge on the back of a great turtle. The Odawas identified the manitous in this tale as panther-like water spirits from an aqueous underworld who had flooded the world while chasing the trickster-hero Nanabush (who had killed their chief). The Ho-Chunks, a Siouan-speaking people from Wisconsin, focused their creation account on persistent links between the celestial and terrestrial: after creating the “island earth,” Earth Maker fashioned four humans, named Hagaga, Henuga, Kunuga, and Nangiga, from dust and “a part of himself.” He sent the four brothers to live on the world below but gifted them with fire and tobacco, which served as “mediator[s] between you and us” in the spirit realm. All of these stories conveyed similar lessons: human beings had both divine and earthly natures, and they lived in a world crowded with spiritual beings, some helpful and some dangerous.1
Modern archaeologists cannot affirm an otherworldly origin for Native Americans, but they do think that the first human beings arrived in the Western Hemisphere a very long time ago—approximately fifteen thousand years before the present day. These ancestors of the modern Lakes Indians reached their homelands just as the region was becoming inhabitable. The first people to migrate to America, the Paleo-Indians, probably crossed the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age. At the time, much of the world’s water was locked up in the greatly expanded polar ice caps, and sea levels were lower, so low that the Bering Strait was not open water but a marshy, one-thousand-mile-wide land corridor connecting Siberia with Alaska. The Paleo-Indian migrants crossed this isthmus on foot or used small boats to follow the coastline. Whichever route they followed, they and their descendants gradually made their way down the Pacific coast, past the frozen, ice-covered lands of present-day Canada and the northern United States, and then spread east and south to people the hemisphere.2
During the time of this migration, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a glacial mass larger than the present-day Antarctic ice sheet, covered the lands around the Great Lakes, as far south as central Illinois. As this ice melted in the late Pleistocene, the runoff flooded the region’s rivers. Some rivers, like the older Mississippi and Ohio, carved deeper valleys that gradually filled with fertile silt. Others, like the Wabash and Wisconsin, took their modern courses when glacial lakes ruptured, discharging millions of cubic feet of water to the southwest. In the warming and now well-watered lands around the Great Lakes, many varieties of trees took root, first willow and birch, then conifers like spruce and pine, and (by 6000 BCE) maple, oak, beech, and other nut-bearing deciduous species. Browsing animals soon followed, living on the rich plant resources that the postglacial forests provided.3
Human beings began exploiting this new environment before the glaciers fully retreated. Archaeologists have located an eleven-thousand-year-old site in Calhoun County, Michigan, where hunters may have cached mastodon meat in a pond, whose cold water would have preserved their kill. Around the same time, caribou hunters left behind a campsite near present-day Holcombe, Michigan, and another Paleo-Indian party left fluted spear points near future Madison, Wisconsin. Paleo-Indian bands probably hunted large mammals, or megafauna, throughout the region during the late Pleistocene epoch.4
At the end of the last Ice Age, however, the human population of the Americas rose above the level where it could sustain itself through big-game hunting, while many of North America’s large mammals (such as mammoths) went extinct from overhunting and climate change. Faced with a subsistence crisis, the Paleo-Indians began to develop new survival strategies and more sophisticated toolkits. They initiated what archaeologists now call the Archaic era of North American Indian history.
Native Americans of the Archaic period (8000–1000 BCE) learned to subsist on a smaller territory than did the hunters of the Paleo-Indian era. They made fishing hooks and gaffs, which
