The Murder of Joe White: Ojibwe Leadership and Colonialism in Wisconsin

Chapter 5. Giishkitawag Confronts Removal, 1879– 1894

125 CHAPTER 5 Giishkitawag Confronts Removal, 1879–1894 In 1877, Giishkitawag, at age thirty-eight, became ogimaa of the Ojibwe at Rice Lake following his brother Waabizheshi’s death. The seventeen years of Giishkitawag’s leadership were difficult ones. Federal, state, and local governments all challenged Ojibwe sovereignty. The Barron County Board petitioned the federal government for removal of the community to the reservation, and the white population of Barron County boomed. While Giishkitawag did not seek a military solution to avoid removal, historical evidence suggests that Giishkitawag was much more aggressively defiant in resisting removal to the reservation than his brother. Where Waabizheshi avoided federal officials and solely focused on building relationships with local white settlers, Giishkitawag marched up to the reservation, demanded federal rations and other goods for his community, and then returned to Manoominikaan. When federal officials objected to his continued presence off-reservation, Giishkitawag threatened their safety and called the Ojibwe that chose to stay on the reservation cowards. At the same time, Giishkitawag skillfully manipulated federal policy. In the 1880s, allotment of reservation lands to individuals brought the opportunity of income from timber sales. Ironically, while federal officials saw allotment as a way to contain the Ojibwe on the reservation, Giishkitawag tried to use the policy to provide supplemental income to the community as a means for sustaining the continued presence of his community off-reservation. However, the wealth from sale of allotment timber was short-lived. The federal government failed to provide an effective and sustainable management plan for reservation forest resources, resulting in corruption and poverty. As much as assimilation policy robbed the Ojibwe of income through mismanagement of forest resources, a much more direct threat 126| Chapter Five to Ojibwe safety and survival was the law. As federal officials suppressed Ojibwe legal institutions, at the same time they failed to provide the Ojibwe equal protection under American law. For the Ojibwe of Rice Lake, this manifested itself both off-reservation and on-reservation. Off-reservation the Ojibwe were not protected from violence perpetrated by local whites. On-reservation, individuals had little protection against timber trespass and forms of corruption on their allotments. Furthermore, by the 1890s, the state of Wisconsin was intent on enforcement of its game laws on the Ojibwe. State game laws were a direct violation of Ojibwe treaty rights, which were federal law that had never been extinguished. However, federal officials did not assert the supremacy of federal treaty law over state game laws. This made remaining off-reservation increasingly dangerous for the community and its defiant leader. LOCAL GOVERNMENT, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, AND REMOVAL In January 1878, just months after Giishkitawag assumed leadership of the Ojibwe community at Rice Lake, Barron County officials responded decisively to the efforts of his brother Waabizheshi and other Ojibwe at Rice Lake to create an intercultural community. The Barron County Board petitioned the federal government for the removal of the Ojibwe at Rice Lake to the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation. In 1878, Barron County was changing. As old-growth timber was being cleared from the land, white settlers were coming to Barron County to farm. In many cases, these new settlers’ ideas about Native people were informed by stereotypes of Indian savagery and not the centuries-long historical experience of relations between the Ojibwe and outsiders. Their economic livelihood was not based on cooperation with the Ojibwe as fur traders, who supplied traders with the raw materials that they shipped to Europe. Likewise, the timber industry was made up of single white men, many of whom were temporary seasonal workers and not threatened by the Ojibwe. In fact, Giishkitawag and hundreds of other Ojibwe men worked alongside whites in logging camps. Farming was different . Whites sought to make Barron County a land of individual farmsteads. The solution for white settlers was to separate Indian and white communities by containing Indians on the reservation. Ironically, this came at a time when federal officials based in distant La Pointe had eased their efforts to make the Ojibwe at Rice Lake remove to the reservation. Giishkitawag Confronts Removal| 127 In their petition to federal officials, the Barron County Board repeated many of the themes common to removal efforts nationally since passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, illustrating the influence this law had for decades following its passage. The petition read: that the presence of said Indians in Barron County is greatly injurious...