Stories of Migration: The Anishinaabeg and Irish Immigrants in the Great Lakes Region

Fig. 1.

The Seven Stopping Places of the Anishinaabeg's Great Migration.

According to sacred teachings, when the Anishinaabe people lived along the eastern door of Turtle Island, long before any white man arrived on this continent, seven prophets came among them to reveal the Anishinaabeg's destiny unfold in the time of seven fires. The first prophet spoke of a light-skinned people who would cross the great salt water on trees pulled by clouds, and he warned them, 'If you do not move, you will be destroyed'. In the time of the first fire, the people would begin a great migration – their chi-bi-moo-day-win – to a place where food grows on water, the land chosen for them by Gitchi Manido, the Great Spirit.¹

My Irish ancestors were among those light-skinned people who arrived on trees pulled by clouds and joined the flood of white settlers along the same path the Anishinaabeg had travelled on their great migration, down the St Lawrence River, into the Great Lakes region and Michigan Territory which the Anishinaabe people had been forced to cede. This is when the paths of my ancestors first crossed those of the Anishinaabeg, but our paths had long been bound together in the Anishinaabe sacred teachings, and they remain bound though separate, like braided ropes, tied to the past and stretched into the future. The stories of both peoples' migrations echo resemblances beyond the geographical paths our ancestors followed. But to see parallels in our migration stories and resemblances in the forces that moved them is not to suggest an alliance of hardship between our people, although both endured terrible hardship.

Our migration stories reveal the history of racism at the heart of American culture, as European settlers, often fleeing oppression themselves, participated in the oppression of American Indians. The United States has not yet reconciled its past with that of our Indian nations. Nor does it acknowledge the on-going racism born of that past. That racism appears in many forms, from outright hatred displayed on bumper stickers, such as 'Spear an Indian, Save a Fish', violent protests against tribal fishing rights, and demeaning mascots and sports logos, such as 'Chief Wahoo' of the Atlanta Braves. The most systemic racism is the erasure of broken treaties, removal policies and the discourse of conquest in mainstream textbooks and curriculum at all levels of education, an erasure that amounts to revisionist history. In Wisconsin where I teach, for example, few students know anything about the conditions under which their immigrant ancestors arrived; few know anything about the eleven Indian tribes in this state. Their education has provided only fragments of American Indian history or culture and rarely does it include local tribes; it is easier to mythologize the Cherokee Trail of Tears than to confront the forced removals that occurred throughout the Mid-west So among non-Native students and others in mainstream culture there is little understanding of how their families came to occupy this land, or how the past continues to affect the present, or how they themselves might be implicated in the displacement of Indian people and culture.

This was also true for me, until I was assigned to teach a course in postcolonial literature and began to ask myself questions about my own occupation of what was once Indian land. Growing up in Detroit, I had been surrounded by landmarks named in the anglicized language of the Anishinaabeg and marking key locations in their lives and struggles against displacement. But American Indian people existed for me only as museum displays, generic images in colouring books, cigar-store Indian statues and the mythologized figures in the songs I sang as a Campfire Girl. So years later, I set out to retrace my own Irish ancestors' journey and to find the people whose land my Irish ancestors had claimed. I could not imagine then how the Anishinaabe people could point the way to reconcile the past and our separate worlds.

The Anishinaabeg's...