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145 5 Citizen Blackbird During the protracted winter of – Andrew Blackbird spent much time with his father. The son cut timber to build a new house for the old man and in the evenings it is likely they sat by the fire while Mackadepenessy spun out stories about his own adventures in the white man’s world. They may have talked of Andrew’s mother and of the many winters they had spent as a family hunting on the upper Muskegon River. Counting back over the winters, they together worked out how many years had passed since Andrew had been born. Blackbird had never known for sure what his age was and it had never been regarded as important, either by him or his father. Since Andrew had returned from school in Ohio, however , he had begun to feel anxious about the passage of time. The number of winters Mackadepenessy counted since his son’s birth surprised and disheartened Andrew. “I am nearly 30 years of age,” he wrote Bissell in 1851, “older than I ever thought I was.” The thought that he was “nearly 30 years of age” seems to have oppressed Andrew in a way that neither his father or his sisters and brothers would have understood. Indeed, it was a measure of the degree to which Blackbird had incorporated into his worldview the European-American sense of time. Sitting with his father he had suddenly discovered he was no longer young. Just a few years before, he had been among the bright-eyed boys at the Twinsburg Academy sharing books and dreams of the future. Then between 1850 and 1855 he was back in Michigan, and time passed in the Indian way with the seasons, as he moved from job to job, fishing, cutting timber, harvesting corn, teaching occasionally, translating for whites better educated than himself. While he might have taken pride in his successful mission to Lansing and his role as a tribal spokesman, he also seems to have felt anxious and unfulfilled. In spite of having more education than any other Little Traverse Ottawa, save for his cousin Augustin Hamlin, he was prevented from 146| Chapter Five taking a place in the Indian school because of his break with the Catholic Church. Frustrated, he thought of his dream of studying medicine, which seemed to be his future when he was in Ohio. Had the prospect of medical education already slipped beyond his reach? At L’Arbre Croche he did not even have access to a medical dictionary, not that he had “any leisure hours at home to study” due to the need to constantly be “employed at something .” For Andrew Blackbird, life seemed to be slipping away.1 THE TREATY OF 1855 In the spring of 1855 Blackbird received a call to action. The commissioner of Indian affairs, George Manypenny, summoned the leaders of the Ottawa and Chippewa to meet him at Detroit to resolve the permanent status of the Indian people of northwest Michigan. A new treaty had been in the works for many years. The Ottawa had many times petitioned Washington to recognize their persistence in Michigan and move toward a set of policies that would facilitate the economic and cultural changes they had embraced. Only the winter before, a delegation of Grand River Ottawa made their way to the capital to press the government to act. For its part the United States had largely forsaken the removal policy of Andrew Jackson. The rapid movement of American citizens into the region west of the Mississippi River, which accelerated after 1848 and the successful completion of the Mexican War, doomed the fantasy of a “permanent Indian frontier.” Northern Michigan lands were selling briskly, but were actually in less demand by American citizens than lands in Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Michigan’s offer of citizenship punctuated the European-American repudiation of removal. The prospect of citizenship for all of the Ottawa and Chippewa people in Michigan necessitated a new treaty. The 1836 agreement had only provided for the temporary persistence of the Anishnabeg on their old lands. The long-ago expired reservations had become an obstacle to both Indians and whites alike. The treaty had envisioned the surrender of the reservations within five years, but after that deadline arrived in 1841, no removal took place and the lands became a real estate limbo. Whites could not buy reserved lands and Anishnabeg could not improve them because the future status of the land remained uncertain. A...

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