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WELFARE STATE, SETTLER STATE: OJIBWES, SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP, AND DISASTER RELIEF IN THE GREAT FIRE OF 1918

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Chantal Norrgard
Chantal Norrgard*
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar
*
email: [email protected]
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Type
Forum: Indigenous Histories of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 521 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 199.

2 Francis M. Carroll and Franklin R. Raiter, The Fires of Autumn: The Cloquet-Moose Lake Disasters of 1918 (St. Paul:  Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1990), 4.

3 See Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

4 British Sociologist T. H. Marshall first traced the evolution of citizenship and introduced the concept of social citizenship in his essay, “Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).

5 The following works have been especially useful for exploring the questions presented in this essay: Gershon Shefir, ed., The Citizenship Debates: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Kessler-Harris, Alice, “In the Nation's Limits: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era,” Journal of American History 86:3 (Dec. 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Mai M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

6 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford Press, 2001).

7 Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging, 6–13.

8 Wolfe, Patrick, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106:33 (June 2001): 867, 868, 887CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 United States Congress, Dawes Act, February 8, 1887, U.S. Statutes at Large 24 (1887): 388–91Google Scholar. Under the original provisions of the Act, a head of family would receive a grant of 160 acres, a single person or orphan over 18 years of age would receive a grant of 80 acres, and persons under the age of 18 would receive 40 acres each. These allotments would be held in trust by the U.S. government for 25 years. Under Section 6 of the Act, every member of a band or tribe who took a land allotment were subject to laws of the state or territory in which they lived. Every Indian who took a land allotment “and adopted the habits of civilized life” was “bestowed” United States citizenship “without in any manner impairing or otherwise affecting the right of any such Indian to tribal or other property, “but citizenship was not always granted immediately based on wardship and the government's provision to hold land in trust. Moreover, as the Fond du Lac case demonstrates, it was complicated by the provisions of treaties, the diverse political, economic, and geographic contexts Native people lived in, and later amendments to the Act.

10 See Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

11 For more information on the longer history of Ojibwe political culture, see Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

12 Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and British Society in the Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 5.

13 Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 121–22, 156–58.

14 Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 2–6.

15 Exceptions include Duane A. Gill and J. Steven Picou, “The Day the Water Died: The Exxon Valdez Disaster and Indigenous Culture” in American Disasters, ed. Steven Biel (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 277–304; Coll Thrush with Ludwin, Ruth S., “Finding Fault: Indigenous Seismology, Colonial Science, and the Rediscovery of Earthquakes and Tsunamis in Cascadia, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 31:44 (2007): 1–24Google Scholar; and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

16 Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State, 6.

17 See John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). John Barry explores numerous examples of how during the great Mississippi flood of 1927, African Americans living in the Mississippi Delta resided in areas most vulnerable to flooding, were forced to work at gunpoint in some of the most dangerous aspects of flood prevention and relief work and were discriminated against as flood refugees and in the process of receiving relief.

18 See United States Congress, Treaty of St. Peters, July 29, 1837. U.S. Statutes at Large 7 (1837): 536; United States Congress, Treaty of La Pointe, October 4, 1842. U.S. Statutes at Large 7 (1842): 591.

19 United States Congress, Treaty of La Pointe, September 30, 1854. U.S. Statutes at Large 10 (1854): 1109.

20 Walter O'Meara, We Made it Through the Winter: A Memoir of a Northern Minnesota Boyhood (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1974), 2.

21 Charles Cleland, “Preliminary Report of the Ethnohistorical Basis of the Hunting, Fishing, and Gathering Rights of the Mille Lacs Chippewa” in Fish in the Lakes, Wild Rice, and Game in Abundance: Testimony on Behalf of Mille Lacs Ojibwe Hunting and Fishing Rights, ed. James M. McClurken (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 85. Cleland estimates that Ojibwe lands were reduced by 98.7 percent as a result of the treaties of 1842 and 1854.

22 For examples of this land loss and corruption of the lumber industry and allotment in Ojibwe communities, see Melissa Meyer, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

23 Bruce White, “Early Game and Fish Regulation and Enforcement, 1858–1920: A Report Prepared for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe,” Copy given to author by Bruce White, 46–49.

24 Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, 526 U.S. 172 (1999).

25 Chantal Norrgard, Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights, and Ojibwe Nationhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 86–107.

26 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 25.

27 Pyne, Fire in America, 199.

28 Thomas D. Peacock, A Forever Story: The People and Community of the Fond du Lac Reservation, 73.

29 Ibid., 74–75.

30 Ibid., 233.

31 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 37; G. W. Cross “Fond du Lac Annual Report,” quoted in Pine Knot, October 23, 1986, 8; Pine Knot, October 25, 1918, 3 (quotation), William T. Cox, Annual Report for the State Forestry Board for the State of Minnesota for the Year Ending July 31, 1918.

32 Peacock, A Forever Story, 233; Christine Skalko and Marlene Wisuri, Fire Storm: The Great Fires of 1918 (Cloquet, MN: Carlton County Historical Society, 2003), 24. It is notable that Gurno references bears, because they are considered sacred to Ojibwe people and play an important role in their beliefs.

33 Peacock, A Forever Story, 213. As indicated by newspaper articles and the records of the Office of Indian Affairs, no one from the Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwe perished in the fire.

34 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 117.

35 Peacock, A Forever Story, 80, 87.

36 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 150.

37 Peacock, A Forever Story, 80.

38 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 153.

39 J. A. Fesenbeck to G. W. Cross, October 12, 1920, Record Group 75, Central Classified Files, #86486-1920-Red Lake-260-Part 1, National Archives, Washington, DC.

40 J. E. Diesen to George W. Cross, March 11, 1922, Record Group 75, Central Classified Files, #86486-1920-Red Lake-260-Part 1, National Archives, Washington, DC.

41 Ibid.

42 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 217.

43 Joseph La Veirge v. James C. Davis, 166 Minn. 14; 206 N.W. 939; 1926 Minn.

44 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 154.

45 Joseph La Veirge v. James C. Davis, 166 Minn. 14; 206 N.W. 939; 1926 Minn.

46 Indian Citizenship Act, 43 United States Statutes at Large, Ch. 233, p.253 (1924).

47 Carroll and Raiter, The Fires of Autumn, 155; Peacock, A Forever Story, 80.

48 F. A. Asbury, S. N. McKinsey, and D. D. Mani, “Economic Survey of the Consolidated Chippewa Jurisdiction of Minnesota,” 1938, Minnesota Historical Society Archives, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2.

49 United States Statutes at Large, 74th Congress, 1st session, 1935, pt. 2:2194–95.