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chapter 8 Labor and Leisure in the “Enchanted Summer Land” Anishinaabe Women’s Work and the Growth of Wisconsin Tourism, 1900–1940 Melissa Rohde In 1922 the federal Indian service conducted a series of industrial surveys on reservations aimed at determining the success of its effort to educate and assimilate the nation’s Native people. Officials at the Lac du Flambeau and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservations in northern Wisconsin began visiting homes in the spring. Trudging from home to home, officials collected data on employment and family relations and recorded their impressions of the industriousness of the people they examined. Although local officials evaluated women primarily on the basis of their ability to “keep house,” their reports nevertheless revealed that female members of the tribe carried out a variety of tasks inside and outside the home. Even though compliments came in gendered terms—Lac du Flambeau’s Mrs. Margaret Brown was said to “work like a man”—these surveys provide a window onto a diverse world of labor and entrepreneurial adaptation. Agents reported Ojibwe women combined wage labor with gardening, gathering, and commodity production and were key to the survival and success of their households (Reports of Industrial Surveys, Lac du Flambeau). The work undertaken by Ojibwe women in 1922 was all the more important because of dramatic shifts underway in the economies of the reservation and the surrounding community of non-Indian towns and farms. As the lumber industry exhausted available timber and moved on from northern Wisconsin, communities struggled to reinvent themselves and find new ways to make a living. Anishinaabe women at Lac Courte Oreilles and Lac du Flambeau were key actors in this economic transformation, because they played a central role in the region’s shift to a service economy based on tourism. Within Anishinaabe communities tourism work provided an avenue where women could respond to changes in the political, economic, and natural environments of their reservations . As local tribes lost control of their forests and lakes, Indians had no choice but to adapt to the arrival of tourists from industrial cities like Milwaukee and Chicago. In addition, the advent of tourism work also enabled Ojibwe women to retain control over their households and their annual cultural and subsistence routines. Tourism-related work offered a new source of revenue without requiring Native women to conform to the government’s program of stamping out what it considered the dangerous and backward aspects of American Indian culture. In northern Wisconsin, Anishinaabe communities were able to use tourism work and tourists to counter Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) programs that sought to destroy their cultures and curb their autonomy. Through their innovation and adoption of aspects of tourism work, Ojibwe women continued a gendered system of labor that was key to the culture of work in their communities. Considering women’s work in these two communities reveals the ways in which American Indians were able to hold onto and adapt fundamental structures of labor in communities and also the critical role that women played in this process. Tourism work upset not only the U.S. federal government’s narrow, paternalist model of labor but it also challenges a perspective that has limited scholars’ ability to incorporate American Indian women’s labor into their histories of work. Tourism labor is valuable in this regard because it requires a broad conception of work and workplace. It includes many activities in which women played a vital role, such as commodity production, domestic labor, farming, gathering, and performance, and that contributed to the maintenance of Native American households and communities. Yet such activities have been largely overlooked at times by scholars who operate with a narrow definition of work as primarily waged labor (Kessler-Harris 1993). It brings together types of work that have been separated by binary constructions of labor according to gender or to their supposed reflection of “traditional” or “modern” economic systems (O’Neill 2004). In doing so, tourism work challenges divisions within labor history and highlights women’s contributions to reservation economies and their role in maintaining and adapting cultural systems of labor division. The range of activities that came to be associated with tourist work also suggests how diverse and complex Native subsistence strategies had become by the 1920s. People like the residents of Lac Courte Oreilles and Lac du Flambeau followed a yearly, opportunistic circuit that exploited the rich and varied resources of the local environment. Rooted in ancient lifeways, this circuit had not disappeared with...

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