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

Introduction

xiii Introduction On December 13, 1894 Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe ogimaa (or chief) Giishkitawag was shot to death by game warden Josiah Hicks on the orders of his superior, Horace Martin. The game wardens were serving Giishkitawag with an arrest warrant for hunting deer out of season. Giishkitawag, or Joe White, as local whites knew him, was the leader of an Ojibwe community at Rice Lake, Wisconsin. The shooting occurred north of Rice Lake at Long Lake, an important site for Ojibwe fishing and wild rice gathering. Giishkitawag was traveling from Long Lake to the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation when the Rice Lake game wardens caught up with him. According to witnesses including family members present that day, Giishkitawag took a single step back as Martin and Hicks attempted to place him in handcuffs. This seemingly small action nonetheless provoked Martin and Hicks, and they began to beat Giishkitawag with the handcuffs and the end of a shotgun. As Giishkitawag began to fear for his life and attempted to flee, Hicks shot Giishkitawag, killing him almost instantly. At the time of his murder, Giishkitawag, like all Lake Superior Ojibwe, was guaranteed the right to hunt off-reservation in treaty rights, reserved rights never extinguished. While this shocking act of violence might today appear a quick or random event in an era when racial violence was common, it was in fact an event decades in the making, an action that was the direct result of the history of American colonialism operating against Native people in Wisconsin.1 Rice Lake, Wisconsin, is a town of about eight thousand in the northwest part of Wisconsin. It is so named because of a shallow, 859-acre lake that borders the town. Wild rice, the food source for which the lake is named, is not rice at all but a highly nutritious grain, which once grew in dense stands over the entirety of the lake. Vital to the survival of the Ojibwe and other Native people of the region for centuries, wild rice can be stored for long periods of time without spoiling. Though small by many standards, Rice Lake is still the largest city in this part of northwest Wisconsin and draws people of surrounding smaller towns from a radius of over sixty miles. xiv| Introduction One of these communities is Hayward, Wisconsin, fifty miles northeast of Rice Lake. Ten miles south of Hayward is the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Indian Reservation. The Lac Courte Oreilles (or LCO) Reservation includes 69,072 acres, of which the tribe or individual tribal citizens own just over fifty thousand acres; 2,252 of the 6,154 enrolled tribal citizens live on the reservation.2 At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Lac Courte Oreilles Band consisted of seven communities spread out in a vast area along the Chippewa River watershed. The band originated and took its name from the community at Lac Courte Oreilles, but by the nineteenth century the largest and most influential Ojibwe community was at Rice Lake. The community was influential because the Ojibwe at Rice Lake had access to the rich prairie hunting grounds to the south and the vast wild rice beds of Rice Lake and nearby Prairie Rice Lake. Their influence was sustained by the military success of the leader of the community, Nena’aangabi, in campaigns against Dakota people to the southwest. The rise of Nena’aangabi coincided with American expansion in the western Great Lakes. In the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825, the Native nations of the western Great Lakes agreed to boundaries among one another that paved the way for future land cessions. In 1837, Ojibwe leaders sold their lands in northwest Wisconsin in exchange for yearly payments of cash and goods over a twenty-year period. However, the majority of the signers of the treaty were leaders who represented communities outside of the territory ceded. Although Nena’aangabi attended the council, he refused to sign the treaty. Despite selling their lands, under the treaty, the Ojibwe retained their essential rights to hunt and fish throughout the ceded territory, and the federal government made no effort to remove them. When removal pressures came, it was not from the federal government but from local officials, in the person of Minnesota Territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey. In 1850, Ramsey plotted to remove the Wisconsin Ojibwe to Sandy Lake in northern Minnesota in order to benefit his furtrading cronies in Minnesota who stood to profit from the payment of...