Long before they were incorporated into the fledgling United States, many contested spaces existed throughout North America where Native Americans and Euro-Americans both intermingled and grappled for dominance. A region that this study refers to as Greater Mackinac – anchored in the Indigenous villages of Mackinac Island, Waganawkezee (L’Arbe Croche), Baawitigong (Sault Ste. Marie), and Mooningwanekaaning (Madeline Island) – emerged as an arena where Anishinaabeg engaged commercially and diplomatically with Euro-American newcomers while forging kinship ties that gave birth to new peoples. As the United States seized larger swathes of Indigenous Homeland during the nineteenth century, it simultaneously sought to codify Anishinaabeg and their children of mixed ancestry who lived there as racialized "others." This study explores how Greater Mackinac became a meaningful political unit that afforded unique opportunities for Anishinaabe women and their mixed-ancestry kin to broaden the scope of their autonomy and authority. The complex contours of shifting sovereignty in the nineteenth-century Great Lakes Borderlands deserve greater scholastic scrutiny. "Racializing Indigenous Society" contributes to this scholarship by illustrating the extent to which resistance to the American settler-colonial project could germinate in the growing nation’s peripheries. At this study's core are the stories of four Anishinaabe women – Magdelaine La Framboise, Agatha Biddle, Jane Schoolcraft, and Susan Davenport – who arose from different nodes of Greater Mackinac to become critical cross-cultural intermediaries. Analyzing their life experiences and those of their interracial families reveals how socially and culturally nebulous spaces could empower Anishinaabe women and their mixed-ancestry kin if they were savvy enough to weave between Indigenous and Euro-American worlds. It also enhances understanding of how mixed-ancestry people came to conceptualize and manipulate their own racial identities during the nineteenth century.
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