Living Our Language_ Ojibwe Tales & Oral Histories - Anton Treuer [3]
The Ojibwe did rebound from the debilitating effects of the Iroquois Wars and European diseases, and, contrary to conventional thought, they expanded their territorial domain and population over the next one hundred years. The Ojibwe displaced many of their western Indian neighbors, the Dakota and the Nakota.6 However, the western Lakota had been expanding westward through this period as well, displacing other Indian groups on the plains. Standard models for studying Indian history do not adequately describe the process of Ojibwe and Lakota expansion in the eighteenth century. Both groups were being pulled to the west far more than they were being pushed from the east.7 By 1800, the Ojibwe had exclusive control over the northern half of Minnesota. The Red Lake and Pembina Bands of Ojibwe continued to push on to the Great Plains over the next fifty years, eventually establishing new communities, with their new allies the Cree and the Assiniboin, at Turtle Mountain, North Dakota, and Rocky Boy, Montana.
Tensions between the Ojibwe and the Dakota in Minnesota eased some in the early nineteenth century. There were numerous battles, but the scale of the conflict had greatly diminished and significant territorial changes were now a thing of the past. Both groups had to contend with a new aggressor: the United States of America.
The Minnesota Ojibwe’s eventual dispossession of their land was piecemeal, as treaties were negotiated in 1837, 1847, 1854, 1855, 1863, 1864, 1866, and 1867. After treaty-making in the United States came to a close, the Nelson Act of 1889 established the Red Lake Reservation, including large land cessions from Red Lake and White Earth. Additional land cessions were made at Red Lake in 1904.
The remaining Indian reservation landholdings in Minnesota came under assault through the policy of allotment, established by the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act. Two years later, the Nelson Act of 1889 implemented allotment for all Minnesota Ojibwe except for those at Red Lake.8 Allotment was utilized to break up reservations. Through this policy, tribal governments would no longer own land (except at Red Lake) and each individual Indian would receive a parcel in private ownership. In spite of a twenty-five-year trust period prohibiting the sale of Indian allotments, many allotments were illegally sold or stolen. Timber and land speculators preyed on Indian allottees, with devastating effects. Some reservations, such as White Earth, emerged with less than ten percent of their reservation in Indian hands. Government officials found ways to circumvent protections in the Dawes or Nelson Acts with riders to appropriation bills and amendments to the trust period for mixed blood and “competent” Indians.9 Allotment was not implemented at Mille Lacs until 1926 in order to encourage Indians there to relocate and take allotments at White Earth. By the time allotment was implemented at Mille Lacs, however, there were only 284 Ojibwe left and the remaining land base for allotment was very small.10
The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934 opened the door to stronger tribal sovereignty for the Minnesota Ojibwe, as reservation governments organized and displaced the unwelcome Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had managed the day-to-day affairs on reservations. There were problems with the IRA, as it lumped together the previously separate Ojibwe communities of Sandy Lake, East Lake, Lake Lena, Isle, and Mille Lacs under the rubric of one reservation, leaving many Indians from the district of East Lake in particular feeling disempowered and not properly represented.11