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Title
John Askin's many beneficial binds : family, trade, and empire in the Great Lakes
Creator
Carroll, Justin M.
Date
2011
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
This dissertation argues that John Askin, a prominent British merchant, provides a vista from which to view the fluidity of the Atlantic fur trade and the constraints of the British Empire in the late-eighteenth-century North American Great Lakes. Through the critical exploration of Askin's life, family, and trade, this work examines the complex contestation and negotiation that confronted individuals as they went about their lives, businesses and day-to-day interests. Consideration of the...
Show moreThis dissertation argues that John Askin, a prominent British merchant, provides a vista from which to view the fluidity of the Atlantic fur trade and the constraints of the British Empire in the late-eighteenth-century North American Great Lakes. Through the critical exploration of Askin's life, family, and trade, this work examines the complex contestation and negotiation that confronted individuals as they went about their lives, businesses and day-to-day interests. Consideration of the family that Askin nurtured, the imperial and economic relationships that he maintained, and the public image he crafted shows that Askin maintained constant involvement with the complicated economic and social processes of the multi-ethnic communities in which he lived. Likewise, the network of kinship and colleagues that Askin developed allowed him to mute disruptive imperial demands and quell the economic uncertainty that occasionally defined the Great Lakes. Askin nurtured relationships with important British imperial officials like Major Arent Schuyler de Peyster and maintained several multi-ethnic families that connected him to new regions of the fur trade. This dissertation argues that Askin leveraged these relationships into a prosperous trade and established him as one of the region's dominant merchants, but his economic initiatives competed with British imperial designs, eventually making him a target of zealous British officials during the crisis of the American Revolution.
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Title
Writing Against the Frontier : Contested Memory and Indigenous Counternarratives in the Nineteenth Century
Creator
Luedtke, Aaron
Date
2021
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
This dissertation explores the effects of settler colonialism on Great Lakes Indigenous peoples throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that as settler societies dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their lands in order to gain access to natural resources, they engaged in a process of narrative erasure of those Indigenous peoples in order to justify the violence of dispossession. This narrative tool of settler colonists was also employed in assertions of what I call “frontier nationalism...
Show moreThis dissertation explores the effects of settler colonialism on Great Lakes Indigenous peoples throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that as settler societies dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their lands in order to gain access to natural resources, they engaged in a process of narrative erasure of those Indigenous peoples in order to justify the violence of dispossession. This narrative tool of settler colonists was also employed in assertions of what I call “frontier nationalism” to argue for the prominence of frontier societies in the public arena of print culture in an age when citizens of both the young United States and Canada were debating the characteristics of national identity. From territorial and colonial administrators like Lewis Cass and Sir Francis Bond Head to frontier novelists like Juliette Kinzie in Chicago and Major John Richardson in Upper Canada to antiquarian historians who wrote local and regional histories of the Great Lakes region, and ultimately to professional historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, Great Lakes authors constructed a narrative that celebrated the growth and progress of life on the frontier in a manner that mythologized the region’s Indigenous peoples out of existence. In the meantime, Great Lakes Indians evolved numerous strategies of resistance to both thwart dispossession and removal, and to disprove myths penned by settler society of Indigenous inferiority, incompatibility with progress and modernization, and the inevitability of Indian disappearance. Beginning with the Mohawk siblings, Molly and Joseph Brant, Great Lakes Indians developed understandings of various aspects of western culture that they adapted within their own cultural frameworks to battle the effects of settler colonialism throughout the nineteenth century. The Brants used their understanding of British legal tradition, private property rights, western plough agriculture, Christianity, literacy, and ultimately narrative construction and the public print culture to constantly prove to first British and later Americans that they were capable of adhering to western standards of “civilization.” Learning from the legacy passed on by the Brants, adopted Mohawk war chief John Norton, Mississauga chief Peter Jones, and Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon all used their own understandings of western expectations for Indigenous peoples to prove they were deserving of governmental exceptions to policies of Indian removal. Throughout the nineteenth century, Great Lakes Indians responded to the settler colonial violence of narrative construction and Indigenous erasure by turning to the world of print. John Norton wrote a history of the Haudenosaunee just after the War of 1812 that he intended for publication though it wound up on a shelf for over a century. Peter Jones also wrote a manuscript on the history of the Ojibwe people that he intended to publish, but because of his early death, it was later published by his wife. Leopold Pokagon’s son Simon earned the most acclaim in his lifetime, publishing numerous works including his novel, Queen of the Woods, and his Red Man’s Rebuke, which he printed on birchbark paper and distributed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This dissertation argues that these writings all serve as evidence of the survivance of Great Lakes Indians in the midst of a settler colonial impulse to eradicate Indigenous peoples from the landscape and historical memory.
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Title
Under one big tent : American Indians, African Americans and the circus world of nineteenth-century America
Creator
Hughes, Sakina Mariam
Date
2012
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
ABSTRACTUNDER ONE BIG TENT: AMERICAN INDIANS, AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CIRCUS WORLD OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICABySakina Mariam HughesMy dissertation, "Under One Big Tent: American Indians, African Americans and the Circus World of Nineteenth-Century America," rewrites the history of the Old Northwest and argues that diversity was crucial to community development in this region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This dissertation recovers the story of a different past that has been...
Show moreABSTRACTUNDER ONE BIG TENT: AMERICAN INDIANS, AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CIRCUS WORLD OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICABySakina Mariam HughesMy dissertation, "Under One Big Tent: American Indians, African Americans and the Circus World of Nineteenth-Century America," rewrites the history of the Old Northwest and argues that diversity was crucial to community development in this region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This dissertation recovers the story of a different past that has been repeatedly ignored where Indians and blacks not only lived in the Midwest, but also were prominent founders of communities. I contend that both Native and African Americans were as pioneering as the white farmers that encircled them, and that their early and sustained presence encouraged two of the nation's largest circuses to locate in the Midwest. The Sells Brothers Circus and the Great Wallace Circus located in Ohio and Indiana because of a ready pool of low-wage labor and available lands on which its employees could create and sustain communities and raise their families. While this dissertation focuses on reestablishing this forgotten past, my work argues that the circus provided the means for persistence for both Indians and African Americans and provided them the social and economic means to create and sustain robust communities in the nation's heartland. My research reveals that race and ethnicity in America were not monolithic historical factors shaping community formation. Instead, my research shows how the elites and lower classes of African American and American Indian societies had disparate views about the value of circus labor. African American elites were uncomfortable with circus work, but often viewed the industry as an avenue of uplift. In contrast, leaders of the Society of American Indians viewed such labor as perpetuating primitive images of Native Americans. While both Native and African American entertainers understood the demeaning depictions of race that they performed in the Wild West and minstrel shows of the circus, both groups relied on the higher wages of the industry to sustain their households. But Indians and African Americans differed in their long-term goals. African Americans used circus employment to create educational opportunities for young ragtime and jazz performers which enhanced their mobility, while Indians used access to wage labor to sustain their communities and insure that they remained on or adjacent to their homelands in the Midwest. I use eighteenth-century missionary and church records, community and oral histories, and treaty negotiations to place Miami, Wyandot, and African American people in the Old Northwest and to show ways that they built and maintained communities. I use nineteenth and twentieth-century Native American and African American newspapers to show the scope of traveling musicians, the challenges they overcame to create spaces for themselves, and how they moved beyond the circus industry to other national and international opportunities. I use circus archives, industry journals, and route books to reconstruct circus towns and life in traveling circus communities.
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Title
Contested authority : indigenous borderlands of the Western Great Lakes
Creator
Jurss, Jacob
Date
2017
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
"Contested Authority," uses the 1825 Prairie du Chien treaty council as a case study to examine the dynamics of power and authority of an Indigenous borderland located in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wild rice lakes and maple sugar forests of the western Great Lakes. This research centers on the interactions and overlapping territorial claims of Dakota and Ojibwe communities that complicated efforts by United States officials to solidify their own claims to the region. The Americans...
Show more"Contested Authority," uses the 1825 Prairie du Chien treaty council as a case study to examine the dynamics of power and authority of an Indigenous borderland located in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wild rice lakes and maple sugar forests of the western Great Lakes. This research centers on the interactions and overlapping territorial claims of Dakota and Ojibwe communities that complicated efforts by United States officials to solidify their own claims to the region. The Americans argued that leaders of Great Lakes tribes should delineate their boundaries believing that such boundaries would secure peace between the tribes. American authority in the region was still a weak presence, but American efforts led by Michigan Territorial Governor, Lewis Cass, intended to strengthen the federal government's position in the lands west of Lake Michigan. The ongoing conflict between the Ojibwe and Dakota greatly concerned the Americans as the tribe's sporadic warfare dampened the enthusiasm for settlement and endangered American settlers. Cass' efforts to enforce American ideas of private property conflicted with Ojibwe and Dakota community understandings of environmental resources and property. This research presents the multi-dimensional relationships that made up authority in Ojibwe and Dakota society, explores the efforts of Cass and American agents to disrupt these traditional power structures, and highlights how Indigenous leadership structures persisted despite these American attempts to dismantle them.-- Abstract.
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Title
Peace, power and persistence : presidents, Indians, and Protestant missions in the American Midwest 1790-1860
Creator
Nutt, Rebecca Lynn
Date
2015
Collection
Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description
AbstractPEACE, POWER AND PERSISTENCE: PRESIDENTS, INDIANS, AND PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN THE AMERICAN MIDWEST 1790-1860ByRebecca Lynn Nutt This dissertation explores the relationships between the Shawnee and Wyandot peoples in the Ohio River Valley and the Quaker and Methodist missionaries with whom they worked. Both of these Indian communities persisted in the Ohio Valley, in part, by the selective adoption of particular Euro-American farming techniques and educational methods as a means of...
Show moreAbstractPEACE, POWER AND PERSISTENCE: PRESIDENTS, INDIANS, AND PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN THE AMERICAN MIDWEST 1790-1860ByRebecca Lynn Nutt This dissertation explores the relationships between the Shawnee and Wyandot peoples in the Ohio River Valley and the Quaker and Methodist missionaries with whom they worked. Both of these Indian communities persisted in the Ohio Valley, in part, by the selective adoption of particular Euro-American farming techniques and educational methods as a means of keeping peace and remaining on their Ohio lands. The early years of Ohio statehood reveal a vibrant, active multi-cultural environment characterized by mutual exchange between these Indian nations, American missionaries, and Euro- and African-American settlers in the frontier-like environment of west-central Ohio. In particular, the relationships between the Wyandot and the Shawnee and their missionary friends continued from their time in the Ohio Valley through their removal to Indian Territory in Kansas in 1833 and 1843. While the relationships continued in the West, the missions themselves took on a different dynamic. The teaching methods became stricter, the instruction observed religious teaching more intensely, and the students primarily boarded at the school. The missionary schools began to more closely resemble the notorious government boarding schools of the late-nineteenth century as the missions became more and more entwined with the federal government. This work further allows an evaluation of the role that the U.S. government and the missionaries played in the shaping of Indian Removal and U.S. Indian policies, and examines the methods of Indian removal that go beyond the traditionally held images of the 1838 forced removal of the Cherokee nation.
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