-
Afterword
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Afterword M etis identity or nationalism in the western Great Lakes region experienced a far different fate than it did at Red River or other places in Canada. In Michigan , Wisconsin, and Minnesota there existed no large centralized settlement like the one at Red River where the Metis formed a majority of the population . Even as European Canadians discriminated against the Metis during the first half of the nineteenth century, Red River provided a focal point for their identity and aspirations. The persistence there of the fur trade as a viable economic activity after it declined in the United States allowed the Metis at Red River to retain gainful employment. Policies of the Hudsons Bay Company, which relegated most Metis males to laboring jobs without much hope of rising into management in the company, helped to unify them. The Metis at Red River coalesced around their common experiences and developed a social and political identity which has endured to the present.1 No such experiences unified the Metis living in the western Great Lakes. By the late 1830s, both the American Fur Company and most of the people who had made up the evangelical community at Mackinac had vanished, and the mission closed in 1837. In 1834, William and Amanda Ferry moved to Grand Haven, Michigan, where he started another Presbyterian church and became involved in the lumber business. The church at Mackinac had lost its spiritual leader, and the American Board never found an ordained minister to replace him. The other teachers, their assistants, and students also left. Also in 1834, John Jacob Astor sold his interest in the American Fur Company to Ramsay Crooks, who transferred many of its functions to Sault Ste. Marie and La Pointe. Consequently, traders and their employees from the Lake Superior country no longer visited Mackinac during the summer, but went to these other posts instead. Now the men of the trade wanted teachers sent to their homelands, a request the American Board began to honor in 1830. Metis children who had come to Mackinac with their parents came no longer. 133 BATTLE FOR THE SOUL In effect, Americanization had produced the mission and also brought about its demise. Since Mackinac did not grow into a major center of American settlement , the governmental, commercial, and political institutions established there served only a relatively few people. Many men, women, and children passed through Mackinac on their way west, but only a handful of new American settlers took up residence in the Straits area. Instead, they moved into southern Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and southern Minnesota, where better soil encouraged widespread agriculture, growing towns spawned industry, and promoters encouraged large-scale immigration from the East and Europe. Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and other cities became the centers ofAmerican society in the western Great Lakes, while Mackinac served as one of the gateways for Americans to carry their civilization west. Mackinac, like the Metis, was about to decline. As American commerce and government marched west, Metis families from the Lake Superior region lived in the relative safety of the woods and lakes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, where for another twenty or thirty years they continued their traditional lifestyle. This did not resolve their dilemma; it simply delayed the consequences. Shut out ofAmerican society, many of the Metis moved closer to their Chippewa kin, who were even more alienated from the Americans . Since the Mackinac missionaries misperceived the Metis, they were unable to find or to articulate ways to help incorporate them into the American society that was taking hold in the region. This failure by the missionaries also helped to drive the Metis toward their Chippewa relatives. The story of the Mackinaw Mission confirms that the Metis occupied an intermediary place between Chippewa and European-American societies. More importantly , it demonstrates that where the two cultures overlapped, a middle ground had emerged, which allowed them to live together. It was here that Metis families and Protestant missionaries met and carried out an educational effort that allowed both groups to achieve at least some of their objectives. The analysis of cultural overlaps shows how decades of acculturation between the Chippewas and European Americans had prepared Metis children to meet American evangelical missionaries on at least some terms that were recognizable to all parties. Where they shared common values, such as the importance of the family, they related to one another in constructive ways and reached accommodations that were mutually acceptable. When either group wandered off the middle ground...