Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Chapter 1: Looking Like a White Man: Geopolitical Strategies of the Iowa Indians during American Incorporation

Chapter 1 Looking Like a White Man Geopolitical Strategies of the Iowa Indians during American Incorporation David Bernstein In the winter of 2007, ninety-one thousand people visited an innovative exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago that explored the history of maps and mapping around the world. Midway through the exhibition, these visitors would have come across one of the most uncommon maps ever created (see fig. 1.1). Named after the Iowa Indian leader who presented it to Secretary of War Joel Poinsett in 1837, Notchininga’s Map is unique for a number of reasons. First, it is one of a handful of artifacts that remain from a time and place in which Native spatial knowledge was primarily transmitted orally. Graphic aids—sketches drawn in the sand or ceremonial performances—generally lasted only a few hours or until the next steady rain. Second, unlike most other examples of North American Indian cartography that were created explicitly as navigational aids, Notchininga ’s Map represents a more generalized spatial construction, allowing us a slightly larger window into the worldview of its creator(s).1 The map depicts the river systems of a large section of what is now considered the upper Midwest of the United States, and with it, the historical Fig. 1.1. Nothcininga’s Map, 1837, Size of the Original 41x 27 inches. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Cartographic and Architectural Branch, Washington, D.C. RG 75, Map 821, Tube 520. Looking Like a White Man | 29 migration of the Iowa people and the villages they had occupied since the fifteenth century. A dotted line begins near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin , and continues south to the Iowas’ village on the Wolf River where they lived in 1837 when they presented the map to the Americans. “This is the route of my forefathers,” Notchininga stated at the meeting. “It is the land we have always claimed from old times—we have always owned this land—it is ours—it bears our name.” Unfortunately, according to the accompanying label, the map “failed to allay the pressure from either other Native Americans or white settlers, and the Ioway were further displaced to Kansas and Oklahoma.”At first glance, then, the map seems to be a graphic distillation of what we have come to expect from nineteenth-century Indian-white relations; Native assertion of ancestral territorial claims violently subsumed in an incompatible “clash of cultures,” resulting in Indian displacement and dispossession.2 Yet first glances are deceiving. What appears to epitomize a traditional narrative of antagonistic “Indian” and “white” worldviews in fact confounds such simple categorizations.Notchininga’s Map was part of larger set of social and political tactics the Iowas employed that cannot be placed into such binary categories.Faced with declining wildlife resources and the continued encroachment of more-powerful Indian neighbors,the Iowas in the 1820s began reshaping the economies toward what they hoped would be a more stable agricultural future.At the same time,they adopted new geopolitical strategies aimed at gaining support from American representatives, most notably conscientious appropriation of Euro-American territoriality and cartography. By creating a document in the discourse understood by the colonizing culture, a Ptolemaic map drawn on paper, the Iowas distanced themselves from other native groups. Rather than a dichotomous vision of Indian-white relations, Iowa leaders understood that their communities had potentially much to gain from aspects of white expansion. They met with Secretary of War Poinsett and other American officials to mitigate their recurring and immediate tensions with powerful Indian adversaries. The primary purpose of this article , therefore, is to look beyond circumscribed definitions of Indian-white relations by highlighting this new strategy and to explore how the Iowas used diplomatic—most significantly cartographic—tactics to help shape their rapidly changing world. In so doing, I suggest a new evidentiary source for a growing number of scholars who have gone beyond traditional narratives in which Indians are forced to choose between the extremes of“acculturating to” or“resisting”American westward expansion.3 In addition to illuminating specific geopolitical maneuvers made by the Iowas, by highlighting the Indians’ appropriation of certain aspects of 30 | David Bernstein Euro-American territorial constructs, I address a larger issue within the study of Native American cartography. Though there has been no lack of interest in the map—in addition to the exhibit, it has been reproduced in at least...