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Taming the "Savagery" of Michigan's Indians
by
James Z. Schwartz
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When immigrants from New England and western New York began streaming into Michigan in the late 1820s, they voiced great alarm about the perceived barbarism and wildness of the territory's first inhabitants. Although Michigan's Native Peoples had developed complex, sophisticated cultures, Yankee-Yorkers viewed them as primitive savages who existed without ethical or spiritual boundaries, worshipped false gods, drank excessively, delighted in violence, and lived like animals. Consequently, Yankees insisted, Native Peoples failed to achieve the technical, moral, or intellectual progress that distinguished civilized from savage societies. Michigan's French residents seemed nearly as barbaric as its Native Peoples to these Anglo settlers. In their opinion, the French had relinquished their civilized ways for savage Indian customs rather than trying to tame Indian wildness. |
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Appalled by Native Peoples' behavior, Yankee-Yorkers sought to eradicate what they viewed as savagery and to avoid the fate that had supposedly befallen the French. To accomplish these goals, they established two types of boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior: both types of restraints would help to establish order and to stabilize group identity by transplanting New England norms to the West. The first control entailed establishing formal legal boundaries, including laws to reduce Native drinking and treaties to place tribes on reservations or to force them out of Michigan. The limits that followed were informal cultural boundaries, which consisted of books and articles in local newspapers that sought to persuade Michiganians to reject the lure of Native ways. |
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When this effort to civilize Native Peoples was at its height in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Michigan contained roughly eight thousand Native inhabitants and some thirty thousand white settlers.1 Most of the former were Algonquian speakers who belonged to one of three tribes—the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, or Odawa. They engaged in hunting, fishing, and agriculture, supplementing their income by trading furs for European manufactured goods. In addition, Michigan's Native Peoples had established what scholars describe as a borderland culture. This culture arose after the French claimed Michigan in the seventeenth century. As Native Peoples and Europeans mixed, they exchanged values, customs, and material goods, creating a hybrid or borderland culture that fused Indian and European elements into new cultural forms.2 Destroying these practices, Yankee-Yorkers believed, would enable them to preserve the purity of New England culture, instilling in Michiganians such important Yankee values as sobriety, industriousness, commitment to one's calling, and adherence to the tenets of evangelical Protestantism. |
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In examining this "civilizing" process, which occurred primarily during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, this article seeks to bridge the literature on state formation, which in the past has focused mostly on formal legal boundaries, and the "new western history," which concentrates on informal cultural borders. Thus, it will demonstrate the importance of multiple boundaries in both "taming" Native Peoples and establishing republican polities on the frontier. Additionally, this article joins a growing list of works that sheds light on a relatively neglected feature of borderlands—the methods that anxious elites used to destroy them.3 |
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Eradicating borderland culture in Michigan, however, turned out to be a daunting task. Rather than simply reestablishing Yankee norms in the West, Michigan leaders created hybridized boundaries that differed in significant ways from those in the East, fostering a local culture that granted women and other groups more power and autonomy than they possessed in New England. Thus, the battle to contain wildness resulted not in a pure transplantation of eastern culture, but in the creation of new regional forms that differed somewhat from the Yankee norms on which they were based. |
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