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Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan's Native Americans

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Charles E. Cleland is a professor of Anthropology at MSU. His book Rites of Conquest is a compelling historical account of the native cultures of the Great Lakes Region, USA. Cleland's is in a sense an alternate history; alternate because it is told from the perspective of the Natives, rather than the Europeans.

About 25% of the book focuses on pre-European arrival. For pre-European contact, Cleland uses Ethno-Anthropology to reconstruct the history of the region prior to written language. Really, this is a hodgepodge of methods, including linguistic, archeology, and Oral tradition. Cleland spends one long chapter zooming through the stone age, explaining the progression of ethnically and culturally different peoples. He briefly describes a few notable cultures, and gives a general idea of the way these natives interacted with their environment.

He then slows down to focus on the woodland culture that existed in the time before European (French, in this case) arrival. These are the Anishnabe. Later more distinct categorizations would be made by the conquering Europeans, ultimately, Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi (though a series of maps lets you see the drastic movement of groups from first contact to present day.

The middle portion of the book deals with interactions between Indians and Europeans; first French, second English, lastly Americans. The book provides a context for these interactions from a Indian cultural viewpoint, which reveals much that would ordinarily be looked over in a traditional account (ie Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State).

Cleland has put together an account that provides a much greater understanding of the native cultures than one is likely to receive in school or through reading traditional History books.

I am from Michigan and wanted to know about my state's history, so I picked this book up. This has everything you could possibly need to know about the Native Americans of Michigan, and the surrounding states. The only reason I didn't give it five stars was that it read like a text book. I felt like I was back in school. Out of all fairness, however, it is a history book, so I can't really hold that much against it. It gets redeemed by the small biographies scattered through the chapters.:)

Each year, thousands of visiting Michigan school children file through the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol building past an imposing statue of Lewis Cass, Michigan's territorial governor from 1813 to 1831. The guide likely throws out brief factoids on his tenure, leaving the students with some vague impression that this portly, serious-looking guy did something great. At the US Capitol's website, we're told that "his tenure was marked by good relations with the numerous Indian tribes under his jurisdiction." Anyone who's read Charles Cleland's beautifully researched "Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan's Native Americans" would gag at such a statement.

Cass is not the only character in the history of the slow erosion of Indian (I'll use "Indian" here as Cleland does) livelihoods in the Great Lakes region, but his activities marked a stunning apex of greed which was born with the first European (French, essentially) arrivals in the 1600s. Before that, the material record indicates that Indians occupied the area of what we now call Michigan for 12,000 years ("In contrast to the 350 or so years non-Indian people have lived on the shores of the Great Lakes, such a tenure is immense"). Cleland brings to life the likely realities of the Anisnabeg, the Algonquian-speaking people who fished, hunted and later farmed the region and who, importantly, travelled for food and social reasons along with the seasons (summers fishing at the lake in larger villages, winters hunting the interior). Cleland deftly avoids romanticizing traditional Indian life while at the same time fostering a deep respect for their endurance and connection to the land.

After European arrival, a wave of different tribes washed over the area, fleeing or following various wars. What we now think of as traditionally "Michigan" tribes: the Ojibwa, Ottawa and Potawatomi originated in today's Canada and Wisconsin. Warfare was not unknown prior to the Europeans, but it increased as the French fur trade gained momentum and allies, and Indians sought new, useful products (cloth, metal, guns) from this new French "tribe". In contrast to the British and eventually the Americans who would follow, the few French traders operated on relatively even ground with their Indian counterparts. Over time, Indians were increasingly conscripted as mercenaries in wars between France and Britain or Britain and America.

But the most heartbreaking chapter in this history has got to be the late-18th and entire 19th century, after the establishment of the US. In conventional history, we think of this era as the beginning of our great independence. For Michigan Indians, it was exactly the opposite as a hungry new country swindled all but the tiniest speck of land from them by both formal and informal means. That a people used to migrating with the seasons fared so poorly in trivial, static "reservations" is not surprising. You know the story, but you'll weep at the details. The aforementioned Cass played one of the biggest roles in this swindle.

What makes this book so special is its ability to weave history and anthropology together seamlessly. Most Americans have a general sense of atrocities carried out against indigenous people, but Cleland describes the cultural underpinnings of misunderstanding and manipulation that continue to have such an impact on Indians today. Primarily, those are the conflicts between oral and written methods of documenting history, the difficulty of ascribing names/identity to individuals and tribes, and the disconnect between Western economic systems and Indian traditions of gift giving. All of these divisions played out, pretty much solely to Indians' disadvantage in treaty negotiations and other methods of land acquisition.

As an environmentalist, I'm interested in history that's tied not to an ethnic group or state, but to the land. For that reason, I think every American should know the local indigenous history of their region - it gives a humbling counter to our sense of ownership and identity as citizens of a place. Cleland's book is not only an important contribution to Michigan history, but hits on fundamental questions about the founding and future of our country.