Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago by John N. Low (review)

IN IMPRINTS JOHN N. LOW offers a history of how the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the city of Chicago influenced—or made imprints on—each other, from the precolonial Potawatomi presence in the region to the present. In chapters that focus on Potawatomi leaders such as Leopold Pokagon and his son Simon Pokagon, Michael B. Williams, and Leroy Wesaw alongside Chicago's efforts to eliminate Potawatomi people from its land and memory, Low details the creative ways the Pokagon Band resisted assimilation and elimination. While the 1833 Treaty of Chicago forced many Potawatomi people to relocate west of the Mississippi, the Pokagon Band retained a land base in Michigan. Tribal leader Leopold Pokagon negotiated an amendment that allowed his band to remain on land he had been granted by the federal government. In such contexts of removal, assimilation, and cultural erasure, the Pokagon Band maintained a relationship with Chicago. As Low shows, Pokagon Band members felt a great deal of ambivalence toward the city, given its history of colonialism, but they engaged with the city nonetheless. They transformed what were often attempts to misremember or forget Chicago's relations with Potawatomi people into opportunities to exercise agency over representations of their people and to build inter- and intra-tribal relations. As a result, the Potawatomi shaped the city's history and physical landscape, as Low details in six chapters and several appendices. The book traces Potawatomi imprints in public events, community events, legal land claims, art, writing, and performance.

Key to Potawatomi imprints is what Low calls "re-collection": strategies of "reengaging with the technology and material culture of the past… to support individual and community identity as indigenous peoples" (xiv) and to "reconnect… the past to the present and to the future" (9). In the 1960s, recollection took the form of establishing canoe clubs with the American Indian Center, clubs that strengthened community identity. In the 2000s band members contributed to public art that represented the long history of Native people in Chicago, and they repeatedly engaged in debates about how the city memorialized the Battle of Fort Dearborn (often called a massacre in popular and official publications). Re-collection, Low details, also meant building wigwams in public spaces and filing legal claims to lakefill (areas submerged under Lake Michigan when treaties were signed but later filled in and thus not part of land the Potawatomi ceded to the United States). As these examples suggest, material culture is a crucial focus of Low's study: as he puts it, the "Pokagon Potawatomi constructed monuments, when and where they could, in Chicago" (xiv). Low takes a capacious view of the term "monument," reading books, legal cases, speeches, and acts of everyday life as strategies with which the Pokagon Potawatomi erected physical and intellectual signs of their presence. Low pairs his focus on monuments and material culture with an archive composed of oral histories, interviews, his own experiences and insights as a Pokagon Potawatomi band member, and archival research. In doing so, he offers new interpretations of histories and places that might appear wholly under settler control by showing how strategic Potawatomi participation could turn such sites to tribal uses.

Imprints joins recent scholarship that has revised the relations between Native people and urban contexts, and Low's study is a welcome addition to books by Susan Lobo, Andrew Needham, Reyna K. Ramirez, and Coll Thrush. It adds a new methodological focus to such studies by considering tribal identity as well as geographic location as key frameworks. While at times the focus on the Pokagon Band obscures the fact that, thanks to the U.S. relocation policy of the 1950s and 1960s people from many tribal affiliations call Chicago home, Low's band-specific focus powerfully challenges assumptions—still alive and well in Chicago today—that all Native people were removed from Chicago and its region in 1833. Finally, Low's book contributes to...