Rachael Schnurr

As the War of 1812 drew to a stalemate, the American military began a campaign of fort building across the Great Lakes Region, in an effort to eradicate British presence there once and for all. What followed was a multi-layered process of settler state formation, which put political, judicial, economic, social, and cultural pressures on the indigenous population of the "Old Northwest." Among the Anishinaabeg, Wyandotte, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, and other Native inhabitants, however, were fifty-three communities of mixed European and Native ancestry produced by the centuries-old fur trade: the Great Lakes Métis. Commonly misremembered as "French" settlements today, this project looks specifically at the Métis of what is now Green Bay, and on the ways they adapted to the pressures of settler colonialism through the nineteenth century, despite their indigenous lifeways and ties to Native society. In particular, this project uses the preserved diaries of one member of this community, a French-Menominee woman named Mary Hobart Williams, to identify examples of "survivance"--or the continued presence of indigenous peoples on the land in ways that defy clichéd formulas.

Despite the impositions of the American government, rampant land speculation, racist ideology, the deaths of her children, the disgrace of her charlatan husband, the limitations of her gender, fires, floods, frosts, and more, she remained in her home, the head of a family made up entirely of indigenous women, and on her own parcel of land until her death in the 1880s, when she passed it on to heirs of her choosing. Examining her story, her sacrifices, and how she accomplished this feat defies the clichéd formulas of white vs. Native, colonizer vs. colonized in our national memory and provides us with a much needed, diverse picture of life in the early American West.

This talk is part of the History Speaker Series. For more information please contact Dr. Ashley Johnson Bavery at abavery@emich.edu.