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chapter 2 Making a Living Anishinaabe Women in Michigan’s Changing Economy Alice Littlefield Increasing scholarly focus on issues of gender in recent decades has served to highlight the many silences about women’s lives in the earlier anthropological and historical literature. One result has been a florescence of ethnographic and ethnohistorical research on women in Indigenous North American cultures, and a more richly nuanced understanding of gender roles in many of these cultures and of the gendered consequences of colonization. Scholars have also given increased attention to women’s work lives in the contemporary global economy, resulting in an expanding corpus of research and theory examining ethnic and gender aspects of the ongoing global restructuring of capital. Some of this literature also emphasizes the historical and ongoing importance of national policies in shaping the kinds of opportunities open to women. These trends led me to ask questions about the work experiences of Indigenous women in Michigan, questions I found largely unanswered by the existing literature twenty years ago. Anthropological scholars of the Great Lakes region in the early part of the last century were largely interested in archaeology or the supposedly pristine cultures of the early contact period. Historians likewise largely missed the opportunity to record the ongoing changes in work lives of Indigenous men and women occurring before their eyes. Nonetheless, glimpses of these changing work lives can be gleaned from various sources. In my own work, I have sought to expand our information on the subject through oral history. In addition to published sources, the information drawn together here comes from: (1) interviews conducted in the 1980s with former students of a residential school for Anishinaabe children; (2) interviews on work history conducted in the early 1990s with several women of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe; (3) federal recognition research carried out in the 1990s for the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomis, and in the early 2000s for the Burt Lake Band of Ottawas and Chippewas. I have also drawn to some extent on in- formation gathered in less formal ways, such as conversations with Anishinaabe friends and acquaintances. In this paper I attempt to survey the changes in Indigenous women’s economic lives in Michigan in the context of both the changing regional economy and the ever-shifting policies of government. I hope to show that changing U.S. federal policies have played a key role in the process. At this point, a brief summary of these policies may be in order. The U.S. Policy Environment From the Treaty Era (early 1800s in Michigan) to the present, significant changes in U.S. federal policy have shaped the contours of opportunities open and closed to Indigenous people. The emphasis on assimilation in the nineteenth century involved two major programs designed to achieve this—the privatization of Indigenous landholdings and the establishment of schools to teach English and Euro-American culture to Native American children. A system of residential schools was the keystone of the educational program. By the 1920s, critics began to challenge the wisdom of these policies, pointing to widespread poverty among the supposed beneficiaries, and arguing that the residential schools did little to prepare students to earn an adequate living in the evolving economy (e.g., Meriam 1928). The 1930s brought the Great Depression and government attempts to promote recovery. Among these attempts was the “Indian New Deal,” including a systematic reform in federal-tribal relations. The most enduring legacy of this period is the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which sought to restore limited sovereignty and recognition to the tribal governments that the United States had tried so hard to destroy in the previous era. Although the 1930s reforms had limited immediate impact, they had a significant effect on developments that were to take place later (Littlefield 1993a). The years after World War II brought a renewed emphasis on assimilation. In the 1950s some tribal governments were terminated and the urban relocation program was launched as the solution to Indigenous poverty. This trend was actively resisted by Indigenous people and was relatively short-lived. By the 1960s and 1970s tribal governments were beginning to tap into federal social programs (especially the “War on Poverty” programs of the Johnson administration) that expanded their ability to deliver health, education, and economic services to their members. President Richard Nixon (1968–73), not otherwise known for his love of people of color, declared the termination policy a dead letter and supported several pieces of legislation that enhanced tribal...

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