The Autoethnography of William Whipple Warren

In 1852, one hundred miles northwest of Minneapolis, William Warren was sick with tuberculosis. It was the spring and he lay in bed, writing furiously. Months before, youthful aspirations of a political career ended abruptly with the state's failed attempt to remove its entire Ojibwe population—an effort that Warren had reluctantly administrated. As he wrote, the future of these Ojibwe communities was only slightly more unsettled than their immediate present, and indeed all that was certain was that few tribes would remain undisplaced from their traditional, seasonal territories. Where they would go, or where they were at all, was alarmingly unknown to the state legislators who mandated their removal, men all but consumed by their own struggles for power in St. Paul. And so it was, at the end of an exhausting career fighting with and against these politicians, that Warren—poor, sick, brilliantly talented, and startlingly young—gave himself over to writing.¹

A year later he finished his manuscript and spent his remaining health and energy searching in vain for a publisher. Finally, after a fruitless trip to New York in June 1853, he died in St. Paul at his sister's home, his masterwork still unpublished. Thirty-two years later, the Minnesota Historical Society published History of the Ojibways, the first history of Ojibwe communities from Minnesota to Michigan written by an Ojibwe man. It was also one of the last ethnographic studies to draw exclusively on primary source accounts of the political and cultural histories that preceded, and were being actively uprooted by, a new era of Indian policy.

From one view, Warren's authorship is an act of cultural conservation—a consolidation of Ojibwe knowledge against threats to the cultural vitality of Native communities waged by colonial programs like assimilation, allotment, and relocation. An act of "salvage" perhaps, the book was designed to both archive cultural knowledge and secure Warren's place in an emergent anthropological establishment.² From a different view, however, Warren's History, a desperate act of writing, can be read as a political intervention. After a career spent grappling with the politics of words—working as an interpreter, a legislator, and a broker between tribes, traders, and politicians—Warren's work registers both an engagement with and response to an emergent Native modernity. As such, the political quality of this text may have less to do with its history and more to do with its negotiation with modes of narrative authority, with colonial assumptions about the ancientness or passivity of Natives, and with an imagined future for Ojibwe communities that would include both reserved land in the Great Lakes and urban centers like Minneapolis/St. Paul.

In this way, the politics of this text depend on the shifting cultural geography of Minnesota. We detect this in the ways Warren's text and career "tack across" the boundary lines of cultural authority and obscurity in both recognizable and surprising ways: beginning at what we might call "the periphery" (his father's trading post) and ending at "the center" (St. Paul, where he worked, wrote, and rose to prominence).³ That Warren, an Ojibwe man from the periphery, would author, rather than figure in, an ethnography is one instance of this tacking—a fine example of autoethnography as Mary Louise Pratt defines it, an act "in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizers' own terms."⁴ We sense another, more complex movement when we consider that Warren's was not, in a strict sense, only a "peripheral" cultural authority when he wrote History of the Ojibways. His situation within the political structure of, if not always physically in, the colonial metropole illustrates this second kind of boundary crossing. Warren, who served as a colonial legislator at the same time he drafted his History, and who administrated a removal at the same time he was personally affected by that removal, performs what James Buzard calls an "insider's outsideness"—the ability to see the shape of Native culture from a position of objective distance. In this sense, his work might also be called...