Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Seeing early Detroit through a lens that includes Native Americans and African Americans within the same frame, together with their Euro-American captors and, at times, collaborators, highlights a related set of open and difficult questions that scholars are beginning to fruitfully engage. How can we further explore and understand the attitudes and activities of Native American slaveholders in the North? Did they have practices in common with familiar groups (Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles) that are categorized as the slaveholding tribes of the Southeast and Indian Territory? How did varieties of indigenous political organization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shape slave trading and slaveholding practices in the North as compared to the South, in the woodlands as compared to the plains, and so on? How did earlier patterns of indigenous captive taking and slave labor usage (for instance, in the Fort Ancient and Mississippian archaeological periods and into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) affect later practices of slavery in Native communities? What do we do with the knowledge that so many Native women were first held captive by indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes? How do issues of gender, enslavement, and the racialization of Indians as “Panis” complicate notions of indigenous alliance, negotiation, and as it has lately been termed, “mastery” in interior Great Lakes areas where indigenous groups retained staying power well into the late nineteenth century? Does the language of “mastery” (meant to indicate prowess in imperial dynamics in a way that restores Native groups to a place of rightful recognition in international affairs) take on different connotations when we recognize that some of these “masters” actually possessed human beings as slaves?22

  And in what might be deemed a flip side of the tarnished coin of colonial influences, we must continue to ask the critical question of how we should understand the role of people of African descent within analyses of colonialism in Native American studies and African diaspora studies. Should black people be considered “settlers,” a rhetorical move that groups them together with the Europeans who sometimes enslaved them but that also recognizes how black communities do indeed benefit from the dispossession of indigenous lands? The U.S. slavery historian Max Grivno offers a sharp take on this question, noting that in the “Northwest Frontier,” blacks found a “liberating potential” due to a number of factors, including a diverse population, slavery’s “unimportant role” in local economies, legal challenges to slavery like the Northwest Ordinance, and a high need for labor that increased laborers’ bargaining potential. In this context, Grivno argues, “the frontiers’ free black[s] and slaves were often most comfortable with white settlers, with whom they shared a language and a similar cultural heritage.” While my study of enslaved people in Detroit has led me to see this site in a contrasting way that leans toward commonalities between blacks and Native Americans, I would not deny the fitness of Grivno’s argument, especially in places farther west, such as Minnesota, where Euro-American labor and social systems developed later than in Detroit. Canadian indigenous studies scholars Zainab Amadahy and Bonita Lawrence have wrestled with the question of black settlement in material as well as ethical terms, landing uncomfortably on a notion of “ambiguous settlers” to account for black people’s “desperate need to survive after slavery” while acknowledging that black writers on both sides of the border often fail to acknowledge Native land loss. “Black struggles for freedom,” the co-authors assert, “have required (and continue to require) ongoing colonization of Indigenous land.” In the United States, Native American studies scholars are also starting to think through the ways in which African American relationships to settler colonialism were similar to or distinct from those of Euro-Americans. Jodi Byrd, a Chickasaw literary scholar and colonial studies theorist who has acknowledged her own tribal nation’s role in holding black bondspeople, determined that a separate word, “arrivants,” is needed to capture the difference between black dwellers and white “settlers” on Native lands.23 In the domain of western history, public historian Crystal Alegria and Métis/Cree/Ojibwe doctoral student Jill Mackin are working with the term “refugee” in their development of a narrative that describes the experience of Lizzie Williams, a black woman who moved from Kentucky to Montana out of “desperation” following the Civil War. They seized on this language in rejection of the more common term “pioneer” and in the understanding that “refugee” conveys: “one that flees; especially: a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution.”24

  The aspirational language of “ambiguous settlers,” “arrivants,” and “refugees” strives for a fair and sensitive means of articulating the compromises and complicities of various populations in a painful past. But, as Amadahy and Lawrence suggest, there is perhaps one space in the American-Canadian borderlands in which a radical alterity to colonial and racialized complicity existed: Native communities that accepted blacks via the Underground Railway (or “Railroad” in U.S. parlance). Putting forward Tuscarora “guides” as their primary example (but alas, offering no citation), Amadahy and Lawrence point to those who “risked their lives at a time when Indigenous people could have been enslaved, killed, or dispossessed of their land for helping runaways.”25

  And so it seems we have come full circle. I took up this book project in part because I saw the public commemorations of Underground Railroad history in Detroit as too simplistic and celebratory, as too evacuative of an earlier and more ornery past complicit with racial slavery, but I also concede at this parting moment that the Underground Railroad motif does have the potential to do productive cultural work. The cognitive leap required to see that any operations of the famed Underground Railroad had to take place on current or former indigenous lands compels a respect for first peoples, their land holdings, and their political systems, even within a framework of feel-good popular mythology that obscures the wrongs of the United States, Canada, and the citizens of these nations. If scholars and writers can commit to the serious archival and intellectual project that must accompany such a leap, we can perhaps make progress in urging the publics of which we are part to challenge the intersecting systems and ongoing imprints of slavery and colonialism. The Great Lakes, as the historian Heidi Bohaker has so beautifully put it, was a place of “spiritually charged waterscapes,” for humans as well as other-than-human beings. Perhaps here, in this ancient land of glassy waters, anything was, and still is, possible.26

  Acknowledgments

  I could not have taken up this book project, or completed it within the span of six years, without the wonderful collaboration and assistance of many giving people. Tayana Hardin, once a graduate student in American culture and now a professor in her own right, began work on this project as my first research assistant in the spring of 2012. I then applied to a campus program that funds undergraduate work-study students to conduct research with faculty members, invited graduate students in history and American culture to participate, and formed a small research team on slavery in Detroit. Our group of seven worked over a two-year period to find, transcribe, interpret, and present primary sources. The members of this team, Michelle Cassidy, Emily Macgillivray, Paul Rodriguez, Sarah Khan, Kaisha Brezina, and Alexandra Passarelli, were indispensable to the project and a joy to work with. We created a website to share our findings (mappingdetroitslavery.com). I am grateful to our web designer, Ariela Steif, and to the generous scholars who read our website draft and made suggestions for improvement: Veta Tucker, Greg Wigmore, Brian Dunnigan, and Lucy Murphy. An additional bounty of thanks goes to Michelle Cassidy, who designed the website map and worked closely with the French records to translate church register entries and create tallies and graphs, to Michelle’s husband, Alex Sin, for assisting her with the charts, and to Michelle and Emily Macgillivray, both, who aided me with this project with patience and prime research as well as translation skills for more than three years.

  My brilliant colleagues at UM helped (and saved!) me at every turn, particularly Michael Witgen, who read three
chapters of the manuscript; Brian Dunnigan, who shared his wealth of knowledge about Detroit history and images at various stages of the work and helped me fine tune military references; Greg Dowd, who offered clarifying, corrective, and encouraging feedback; and Martha Jones, my dear friend and toughest reader, who pushed me on the legal aspects of this history. Other generous readers whose feedback greatly improved the manuscript include Michael McDonnell, Jennifer Stinson, and my dear friend Paulina Alberto. Terry McDonald, director of the Bentley Library at UM, shared valuable sources and responded to the links between university history and slavery with absolute openness and a desire to document the facts. As former dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Terry was one of the first to encourage me to forge ahead with my book on Michigan history, a subject beyond my past regional focus on the South. I benefited from hearing reactions to and feedback on this work in talks at Indiana University, the University of Minnesota, Pomona College, Harvard University, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Cincinnati, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. Scholars in the organization Historians Against Slavery helped me to connect past and present in my thinking. Many other people supported me through their input, interest, administrative expertise, inspiration, or quiet encouragement. They include: Stephen Ward, Beth James, Angela Dillard, Karen Marrero, Rebecca Scott, Jay Gitlin, David Blight, Walter Johnson, Christina Snyder, Jodi Byrd, Sherene Razack, Scott Morgensen, Kel Keller, Bill Hart, John Steckley, Andrew Sturtevant, Rachel Whitehead, Phil Deloria, Kristin Hass, Shawna Mazur, Roy Finkenbine, Carol Mull, Del Moyer, Robert Olender, Darryl Li, François Furstenberg, Angus Burgin, Philip Morgan, Liz Thornberry, Father Daniel Trapp, Mark Bodwen and the Burton Historical Collection staff, Lisa Brooks, Christine DeLucia, David Glassberg, Ned Blackhawk, Heather Thompson, Tim LeCain, Brett Walker, Mary Murphy, Susan Kollin, Lucy Murphy, Margaret Jacobs, Christopher Phillips, Nathan Marvin, Emily Albarillo, Wayne High, Judy Gray, Keaten North, Tammy Zill, Mark Simpson-Vos, Eric Crahan, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, David Roediger, Patricia Montemurri, Pat Majher, Krista Ewbank and Kate Sullivan of Saint James Chapel, Melba Boyd, Katie Barkel and Brian Short of LSA Communications, Rowena McClinton, Carl Ekberg, Sharon Person, Margery Fee, my co-instructor, Joel Howell, and all of the talented graduate students in the Literature of U.S. History seminar (winter 2016), Deborah Meadows and Shirley Vaughn of the African American Cultural & Historical Museum of Washtenaw County, Kevin Walsh, Pete Kalinski and Thomas Reed of Digging Detroit, Stephanie Wichmann for French lessons (however poor my performance was!), and surely others whose names I may have regrettably omitted. Thank you to my dedicated agent, Deirdre Mullane, who supports my crazy array of projects and found a fitting home for this one. Thank you, as well, to my editor at The New Press, Marc Favreau, who saw the possibilities for a historical project like this to speak to our present pressing social and environmental issues. I am deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation, which sponsored part of the writing of this book through a New Directions in the Humanities Fellowship, and to the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at UM, which secured for me a teaching release to research the Michigan abolitionist Laura Smith Haviland, an investigation that eventually led to this book.

  As always, my family draws me away from the page to live in this beautiful physical world and makes everything I accomplish possible. I am forever grateful to: Joseph, Nali Azure, Noa Alice, and Sylvan David Gone; Patricia Miles King; Erin, Erik, Benny, and Montroue Miles; James and Sean King; Sharon Juelfs; Rakale Collins-Quarells; Steve McCullom, Tyrone McCullom, and Deborah Banks Johnson; Vanessa, Melvin, Amanda, and Alexis Walker; Maryanna Gone DuBois; Stephanie and Baylee Rain Iron Shooter; and Joseph Azure. Thank you also to Luna for being the one by my desk-side at all odd hours.

  Bibliographic Abbreviations and Quotations

  Because there are three archives and collections that I used repeatedly in researching this book, I have abbreviated references to them in the chapter citations.

  BHC: Burton Historical Collections, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI.

  BHL: Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

  MPHC: This abbreviation, standing for Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, is commonly used in Michigan histories to indicate a massive set of compiled primary materials originally published under the separate titles of: Pioneer Collections (1876–1886), Historical Collections (1886–1912), and Michigan Historical Collections (1915–1929).

  Quotations in this book duplicate the original text of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources to the extent possible. This includes varied spellings for the same names or places and grammatical errors. I have tried to reduce usage of the indicator “[sic]” to denote an error in the original.

  Notes

  Introduction: The Coast of the Strait

  1. For a history of the use of the racial term “red” by Native Americans as well as Europeans, see Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” American Historical Review 102 (June 1997): 624–44.

  2. Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Modern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 11.

  3. Bkejwanong as an Anishinaabe settlement: Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), 47–48. The persistence of French culture: Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1, 11, 155. Detroit as a Canadian dependency: William Renwick Riddell, Michigan Under British Rule: Law and Law Courts, 1760–1796 (Lansing: Michigan Historical Society, 1926), 15. Wild-garlic place: William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 23.

  4. National Audubon Society, “Detroit River—Facts and Figures,” http://web4.audubon.org/bird/iba/michigan/Press/DetroitRiverFactSheet.pdf. Accessed August 9, 2012. “Junction” quote: Jean-Claude Robert, “The St. Lawrence and Montreal’s Spatial Development in the Seventeenth Through the Twentieth Century,” in Stéphane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden, eds., Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities and Space in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 147.

  5. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). For illuminating analyses of indigenous Americans in the Atlantic world and parallels as well as differences between a “black” and “red” Atlantic, see Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). For an astute articulation of the intimate and damaging ties between Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Lowe defines intimacies in this book as the “braided” nature of slavery, colonialism, empire, and the rise of liberal ideology across these geographical spaces as well as the close contacts between people originating from the various continents, 38, 34.

  6. Quoted in Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 13. René-Robert Cavalier La Salle was the first European explorer to sail the Great Lakes. Father Hennepin accompanied La Salle on the 1679 voyage and recorded the earliest detailed description of Detroit. The ship was later lost and has yet to be uncovered. Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis, 13. greatlakesexploration.org/expedition.htm. Accessed December 15, 2014.

  7. Michelle Cassidy, Emily Macgillivray, and Tiya Miles, “Placing Indigenous Peoples in Early Detroit,” in Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safranksy, and Timothy Stallmann, eds., Detroit: A People’s Atlas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming). Ottawa presence: Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 28. Location o
f Huron villages: Andrew Keith Sturtevant, “Jealous Neighbors: Rivalry and Alliance Among the Native Communities of Detroit, 1701–1766” (Ph.D. diss., William and Mary, 2011), 24. Detroit as native hunting ground: Karen L. Marrero, “Founding Families: Power and Authority of Mixed French and Native Lineages in Eighteenth Century Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., Yale, 2011), 134–37. Hurons and Wyandots: The development of the Wyandots as a western configuration of Huron people was an involved social and political process resulting from migration. Some Hurons (Hurons being one of the three branches of the Iroquoian Wendat people of the upper Great Lakes, including Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals) migrated southwest in the mid-1600s in the aftermath of war with the Iroquois Confederacy. The Hurons who settled in northern Michigan near the straits of Mackinac in the 1670s and along the Detroit River in the early 1700s came to be called Wyandots in early U.S. treaties. These Wyandots also included some members of the Petun nation. John L. Steckley, The Eighteenth-Century Wyandot: A Clan-Based Study (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), 22–25. “Coast of the Strait” as a translated Huron name for Detroit appears in Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan: A Chronological Cyclopedia of the Past and Present (1890; Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1969), 3. According to the Huron and Wyandot linguist John Steckley, the Huron word Taochiarontkion does translate into French as “La côte du détroit,” and in English as “the coast of the strait.” Another Huron word for Detroit, Karontaen, translates into English as “where a log lies.” John Steckley, email exchange with Tiya Miles, November 17, 2016. Steckley cited the following reference for these early terms as recorded by the French: Pierre Potier, Fifteenth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario (Toronto: C. W. James, 1920).