The Cadottes

The Cadottes
Author: Robert Silbernagel
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2020-05-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0870209418

The Great Lakes fur trade spanned two centuries and thousands of miles, but the story of one particular family, the Cadottes, illuminates the history of trade and trapping while exploring under-researched stories of French-Ojibwe political, social, and economic relations. Multiple generations of Cadottes were involved in the trade, usually working as interpreters and peacemakers, as the region passed from French to British to American control. Focusing on the years 1760 to 1840—the heyday of the Great Lakes fur trade—Robert Silbernagel delves into the lives of the Cadottes, with particular emphasis on the Ojibwe–French Canadian Michel Cadotte and his Ojibwe wife, Equaysayway, who were traders and regional leaders on Madeline Island for nearly forty years. In The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior, Silbernagel deepens our understanding of this era with stories of resilient, remarkable people.

"Our Relations...the Mixed Bloods"

Author: Larry Nesper
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2021-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438482876

In the Great Lakes region of the nineteenth century, "mixed bloods" were a class of people living within changing indigenous communities. As such, they were considered in treaties signed between the tribal nations and the federal government. Larry Nesper focuses on the implementation and long-term effects of the mixed-blood provision of the 1854 treaty with the Chippewa of Wisconsin. That treaty not only ceded lands and created the Ojibwe Indian reservations in the region, it also entitled hundreds of "mixed-bloods belonging to the Chippewas of Lake Superior," as they appear in this treaty, to locate parcels of land in the ceded territories. However, quickly dispossessed of their entitlement, the treaty provision effectively capitalized the first mining companies in Wisconsin, initiating the period of non-renewable resource extraction that changed the demography, ecology, and potential future for the region for both natives and non-natives. With the influx of Euro-Americans onto these lands, conflicts over belonging and difference, as well as community leadership, proliferated on these new reservations well into the twentieth century. This book reveals the tensions between emergent racial ideology and the resilience of kinship that shaped the historical trajectory of regional tribal society to the present.

From New Peoples to New Nations

From New Peoples to New Nations
Author: Gerhard J. Ens
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 700
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442627115

From New Peoples to New Nations is a broad historical account of the emergence of the Metis as distinct peoples in North America over the last three hundred years. Examining the cultural, economic, and political strategies through which communities define their boundaries, Gerhard J. Ens and Joe Sawchuk trace the invention and reinvention of Metis identity from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Their work updates, rethinks, and integrates the many disparate aspects of Metis historiography, providing the first comprehensive narrative of Metis identity in more than fifty years. Based on extensive archival materials, interviews, oral histories, ethnographic research, and first-hand working knowledge of Metis political organizations, From New Peoples to New Nations addresses the long and complex history of Metis identity from the Battle of Seven Oaks to today's legal and political debates.