by Tiya Miles
2. Therese A. Kneip, “Slavery in Early Detroit,” MA Thesis, University of Detroit, 1938. David M. Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” American Studies 11:2 (fall 1970): 56–66. Cooper, “The Fluid Frontier,” 129–49.
3. Bill McGraw, “Slavery Is Detroit’s Big, Bad Secret. Why Don’t We Know Anything About It?” Deadline Detroit, www.deadlinedetroit.com, August 27, 2012. Accessed August 28, 2012. In 2005 a senior honors thesis addressed the topic of Midwestern slavery with particular attention to Michigan: Daniel Rhoades, “There Were No Innocents: Slavery in the Old Northwest 1700–1860,” Senior Honors Thesis, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, 2005. Brunsman and Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit. Brunsman, Stone, and Fisher, eds., Border Crossings. David Lee Poremba, ed., Detroit in Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001).
4. David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973). Reginald R. Larrie, Makin’ Free: African-Americans in the Northwest Territory (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981). Norman McRae, “Blacks in Detroit, 1736–1833: The Search for Freedom and Community and Its Implications for Educators” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1982). Swan, Lisette. Swan is also the author of a lengthy local history of Grosse Ile: Swan, Deep Roots. Mark F. McPherson, Looking for Lisette: In Quest of an American Original (Dexter, MI: Mage Press, 2001). Christian Crouch, “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revised version of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” The War Called Pontiac’s Conference, April 5, 2013, Philadelphia, PA, 1–2.
5. Frost and Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier. Gregory Wigmore, “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland,” Journal of American History 98:2 (2011): 437–54.
6. Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012). Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 9.
7. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Cangany, Frontier Seaport. The three-hundred-year chronology by David Lee Poremba has also been central to the reimagining of Detroit as a diverse and complex settlement. David Lee Poremba, ed., Detroit in Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan: A Chronological Cyclopedia of the Past and Present (1890; reprint, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1969). Clarence M. Burton, ed., The City of Detroit Michigan: 1701–1922 (Detroit-Chicago: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1922).
8. Cooper, “The Fluid Frontier,” 130.
9. In my use of the term “refusal” here and elsewhere in this book I am drawing mainly from the theoretical work of anthropologist Audra Simpson, who has interrogated the U.S.-Canada border as it has shaped the political and familial lives of Mohawk people in the community of Kahnawake. A key concept that I draw from Simpson is that even while taking into account the many costs and compromises, indigenous people have refused to be defined in static ways by settler states; therefore, the meaning and future of Euro-American and Euro-Canadian political borders on present and former indigenous lands are far from settled. Simpson calls a stance that rejects state “recognition” a politics of “refusal.” Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Border of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); see especially pp. 7, 11–12, chapter 4. I am also drawing from the work of Beth Piatote, a literary scholar who examines reactions to forced domesticities and competing nationalisms in the work of Pauline Johnson and others during the “assimilation” policy period. Beth H. Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 17, 26.
10. Visit the Detroit Historical Museum at http://detroithistorical.org/detroit-historical-museum/plan-your-visit/general-information. The Detroit Historical Museum is run by the Detroit Historical Society: http://detroithistorical.org. Shawna Mazur, a ranger at the River Raisin Battlefield, has researched and published on the black militia and shared her work with the public, park staff, and visitors. In 2009, reenactor Xavier Allen portrayed a black militia member at the River Raisin Battlefield Commemoration. His photo is featured and captioned in Shawna Mazur’s essays. Shawna Mazur, “In Support of America and Freedom: The Establishment of the First Black Militia,” Monroe Evening News (February 2010); Shawna Mazur, “Slavery and the Black Militia,” River Raisin News & Dispatch, Newsletter of the Monroe County Historical Museum, Monroe County Historical Commission & Monroe County Historical Society (July/August/September 2009). Visit the River Raisin Battlefield at: https://www.nps.gov/rira/index.htm.
11. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x. For more studies that focus on Native history in the Great Lakes and Midwest as a borderland, see Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Modern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2006); Daniel P. Barr, ed. The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006); Karl S. Hele, ed., Lines Drawn Upon the Water: First Nations and The Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008). For work that treats the Detroit River as a borderland region, see Wigmore, “Before the Railroad,” 437–54; Lisa Philips Valentine and Allan K. McDougall, “Imposing the Border: The Detroit River from 1786 to 1807,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, Special Issue: The Canadian-American Border: Toward a Transparent Border? 19:1 (2004): 13–22. For work that sees the Midwest as a borderland for African American history, see Matthew Salafia, “Searching for Slavery: Fugitive Slaves in the Ohio River Valley Borderland, 1830–1860,” Ohio Valley History 8:4 (Winter 2008): 38–63; Gary Knepp’s Freedom’s Struggle: A Response to Slavery from Ohio’s Borderlands (Milford, OH: Little Miami Publishing Co., 2008). For treatments of social exchange and development in the Midwest borderlands, also see Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); James Z. Schwartz’s, Conflict on the Michigan Frontier: Yankee and Borderland Cultures, 1815–1840 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009).
12. White raises and then critiques an aquatic metaphor in his introduction to The Middle Ground. He suggests that the story of white-Indian relations has often been told as a story of the sea (representative of Europeans) repeatedly smashing into a rock (representative of American Indians) like a relentless, inevitable storm. White explains that this is a simplistic metaphor of European advancement and Native assimilation (or, in more progressive histories, Native persistence) that he will strive to avoid; White, Middle Ground, ix.
13. Heidi Bohaker closely examines pictographs representing Anishinaabe clans (often used as signatures on treaties) to build an argument that troubles Richard White’s representation of the Great Lakes. Bohaker shows that Native people were accustomed to a mobile lifestyle and maintained a clan system and out-marriage structure that meant they had relatives across the region. These groups, she argues, could therefore not be “refugees” with nowhere to go after conflicts and wars. In addition, she asserts that a focus on the “middle ground” fixes our
attention on cultural exchange rather than on indigenous cultural formations and practices; Heidi Bohaker, “‘Nindoodemag’: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 63:1 (January 2006): 23–52. In his broad study of Ottawa influence in and on the Great Lakes, Michael McDonnell chooses to limit his use of the middle ground frame to military forts, making the point that beyond these dispersed spaces of European or American influence, Native people controlled the terms of interaction. McDonnell also offers a strong overarching dissent from Richard White’s characterization of the Great Lakes region, taking issue with White’s assessment that the inhabitants were “shattered” groupings of indigenous people in the aftermath of trade wars. McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 14, 333, note 6. Andrew Lipman takes a humorous approach to situating and unseating White’s argument through a review of several works; Andrew Lipman, “No More Middle Grounds?” Reviews in American History 44:1 (March 2016): 24–30.
14. In the use of the term “groundless,” I have borrowed from my colleague Greg Dowd, who plays rhetorically with the slate of Native American history text titles that implicitly reflect on Richard White’s phrase, “middle ground.” Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
15. White, Middle Ground, ix. In her sweeping study of French and Indian families engaged in the western fur trade, Anne Hyde captures the influence and longevity of mixed-race networks. She describes these mixed-race families as making up one of “three worlds” or “three streams” next to the white and Native worlds identified by Richard White. Although she does illuminate people often rendered invisible, like White, Hyde does not explore a black world, or even a world of enslaved Indians. Elite mixed-race families make for compelling objects of study, but, as Hyde notes, they were also people of privilege who owned others as slaves. Her work is an indication that even when we turn to the rubric of “family” as a means of powerfully illuminating the histories of marginalized people—particularly women—we can miss other groups who were oppressed by the very subpopulations that our work unearths. Building on White’s and Hyde’s formulation of European, Native, and mixed-race Euro-Indian worlds, I point to a world of the unfree on which these other worlds relied for strength and standing. Hyde, Empires, 1, 3. Brett Rushforth’s broad and insightful study of slavery in New France focuses almost wholly on Native American slaves. Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). As I worked toward this picture of the shared world of bondspeople, I found conversation partners in studies on New England slavery; see, Daniel R. Mandell, “The Saga of Sarah Muckamugg: Indian and African American Intermarriage in Colonial New England,” in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 72–90; Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).
16. Jennifer Kirsten Stinson, “Black Bondspeople, White Masters and Mistresses, and the Americanization of the Upper Mississippi River Valley Lead District,” Journal of Global Slavery 1:2 (October 2016), pp. 165–195. Christian Crouch, “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revised version of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” The War Called Pontiac’s Conference, April 5, 2013, Philadelphia, PA, 20–21. Michael Witgen, book manuscript in progress, “Native Sons: Indigenous Land, Black Lives, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America.”
17. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894).
18. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 153, 154, 182, 188, 192, 198.
19. Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.
20. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), xviii–xix.
21. John Mack Faragher, “‘More Motley than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833, in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 304–326, 305. Faragher borrows the notion of “frontiers of inclusion” from geographer Marvin W. Mikesell. For more on cross-cultural relations in the Old Northwest, see Daniel P. Barr, ed., The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006).
22. A slate of field-changing twenty-first century works that can be categorized as a new incarnation of the “New Indian History,” or, as the University of Michigan doctoral student Harold Walker Elliott has termed it, the “Power School” of Indian history, has explored Native empire, power, and influence in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. See, for instance, McDonnell, Masters of Empire; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists at the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Witgen, Infinity of Nations.
23. Max L. Grivno, “‘Black Frenchmen’ and ‘White Settlers’: Race, Slavery, and the Creation of African-American Identities along the Northwest Frontier, 1790–1840,” Slavery and Abolition 21:3 (December 2000): 75–93, 76, 78, 85. Grivno cites examples from Minnesota and Wisconsin where black men claimed a “white” self-identification and were defined as white for a time by territorial organizers, “Black Frenchmen,” 85, 89; Michael Witgen explores this dynamic in Minnesota at length in his manuscript in progress, Native Sons. In Detroit over the time period of my study, I found no examples of black residents stating that they were “white” or wishing to be seen as such. Zainab Amadahy and Bonita Lawrence, “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada: Settlers or Allies?” In Arlo Kempf, ed., Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada (New York: Springer, 2009), 121, 120. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxx. Byrd credits the Caribbean (Barbadian) poet Kamau Brathwaite with the origination of this term, xix.
24. Tiya Miles, email correspondence with Jill Mackin (doctoral candidate, Montana State University) and Crystal Alegria (co-director, The Extreme History Project), March 17 and 18, 2017. Quoted material is taken from Alegria’s email, March 18, 2017. Prominent historian of the Black West Quintard Taylor also uses the term “refugee,” but more often attached to wartime experience and without an explicit critique of Native land dispossession. Taylor frequently uses “pioneers” and “settlers” to describe black migrants. It is important to note that his work predates the currently common critical discussions of settler colonialism in Native American and indigenous studies. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). For an illuminating analysis of comparative racialization and settler colonialism, see Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” The American Historical Review 106:3 (June 2001): 866–905. For an innovative use of “refugee” reflective of current events, see David Blight, “Frederick Douglass, Refugee,” The Atlantic, February 7, 2017.
25. Amadahy and Lawrence, “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada,” 120.
26. The historian Roy Finkenbine of the University of Detroit Mercy has compiled a three-page list of prima
ry and secondary sources related to Indians and the Underground Railroad in the Midwest. He is working on a chapter based on his findings, which will appear in the edited collection-in-progress: Damian Pargas, ed., Fugitive Slaves in North America (University Press of Florida). For a slave narrative that features Native collaboration, see especially Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849). Manuscripts and dissertations related to this topic are underway by Natalie Joy, at Northern Illinois University, who is working on a book titled “Abolitionists and Indians in the Antebellum Era,” and by Darryl Omar Freeman at Washington State University, who is working on a dissertation titled “The First Freedom Line.” I have made short forays into this area; see Tiya Miles, “Of Waterways and Runaways: Reflections on the Great Lakes in Underground Railroad History,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer 2011); Tiya Miles, “‘Shall Woman’s Voice Be Hushed?’ Laura Smith Haviland in Abolitionist Women’s History,” Michigan Historical Review (Winter 2013). Bohaker, “‘Nindoodemag,” 52.
Index
“In this digital publication the page numbers have been removed from the index. Please use the search function of your e-Reading device to locate the terms listed.”
Abbott, Elizabeth Audrain
Abbott, James
Abbott, Mary
Abbott, Robert
Abbott, Samuel
Abbott & Finchley
Abbott family
Adams, John
African Americans, free. See free blacks
African American servants
African American soldiers. See also black militia
African and African American slaves; Ann Wyley; Blue Jacket and; Clark view; family separation; fire of 1805; French and Indian War; Indian intermarriage; James May ownership; John Askin ownership; New France; Northwest Ordinance; Raudot proclamation; relations with Indian slaves; revolts; Revolutionary War; Ste. Anne’s Church records; William Tucker ownership; Woodbridge ownership. See also black militia; Denison v. Tucker