The Assassination of Hole in the Day (review)

This past year I was invited to work with a middle school where the students were studying Wisconsin American Indian history and culture. I met with a group of fifty students whose most pressing questions to their teachers were "Why did American Indians give up their land? Why didn't they fight back?"

It is not surprising to find schoolchildren and teachers today who are unaware of indigenous people's historic and contemporary resistance to colonization. The field of American Indian history continues to be plagued and defined by scholarship based solely on Western sources and the omission of indigenous knowledge. Some indigenous historians challenge the production of history with works based entirely on the oral accounts of tribal people, making a critical contribution to the field by centering indigenous knowledge. In these works, we hear the voices of opposition and acts of resistance as lived by indigenous people.

The Assassination of Hole in the Day by the Ojibwe author Anton Treuer offers readers an examination of nineteenth-century Ojibwe resistance, land loss, and intertribal conflict through the life, leadership, and death of Bagone-ghiizhig (Hole in the Day). Treuer explores the complexities of Ojibwe politics, survival, removal, warfare, and cultural erosion at the time when the nation ceded thousands of territorial acres to the federal government.

In Ojibwe worldview, balance is a key cultural value. As an Ojibwe scholar, Treuer provides an important balance between written and oral history. He incorporates accounts from more than fifty prominent oral traditional scholars and pairs it with a rigorous examination of Western primary sources, demonstrating that the two are often the same. The oral traditional scholars that Treuer worked with were not simply interviewees. The oral histories were shared as teachings and conversations provided by the oral scholars in the context of their ongoing relationships with Treuer. Here, Treuer writes truly as an Ojibwe whose scholarship reflects the larger cultural values of balance and relationship to community. Treuer provides critical insights into Ojibwe history and culture based on his understanding, use, and study of the language. It is a difficult research endeavor to listen to the oral scholars, put their words into written form, and integrate indigenous language. But Treuer does this well and provides a model for indigenous historical research and scholarship.

The Assassination of Hole in the Day is extraordinarily descriptive in its account of 1800s Ojibwe history. At times, however, the reader may want further explanation or insight. For example, Bagone-ghiizhig strikes out as a self-appointed Ojibwe leader defying traditional determinants based on inheritance, experience, or spirituality. Here, Treuer does not address at length why Bagone-ghiizhig was widely accepted among his people.

However, Treuer's descriptive approach, one with less analysis, in many ways also reflects traditional Ojibwe worldview and practice, whereby oral scholars and oral historians teach indirectly without providing listeners overt answers. Instead, our oral scholars leave it up to the individual to derive meaning through his or her own personal analysis, insight, and further exploration. Thus Treuer's descriptive writing style may further reflect Ojibwe culture.

If Treuer's book falls short, it is in the recording of Ojibwe precontact history, although there is a strong but brief discussion of precontact leadership in chapter 1. More important, Treuer does not provide readers with a context for understanding the conflict between Dakota and Ojibwe people. While there are numerous accounts of Ojibwe/Dakota violence, including warfare, scalping, and blood revenge, there is no explanation for why the violence started and no comprehensive discussion for why it occurred. There is a real danger here, as readers are left with an incomplete understanding of the historical relationship between the two nations.

The Ojibwe and Dakota sacred creation sites are within five hundred miles of each other, and since the beginning of time, Dakota and Ojibwe people lived side by side. The relationships between the two nations are ancient. The Ojibwe language speaker and elder Gary Robson of Garden Hill Manitoba shares oral teachings about thirty...