origins of native americans

“ The question which has puzzled, and still puzzles”

How American Indian Authors Challenged Dominant Discourse

about Native American Origins in the Nineteenth Century

meghan c. l. howey

It is however, still a matter, of doubt and perplexity; it is a book sealed

to the eyes of man, for the time has not yet come when the Great Ruler

of all things, in His wisdom, shall make answer through his inscrutable

ways to the question which has puzzled, and still puzzles the minds of

the learned civilized world. How came America to be fi rst inhabited by

man?

William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway People

This quote from William Whipple Warren invites us into the topic of this

essay: the ways American Indian authors, particularly three contempo-

rary Anishinaabeg writers, engaged with the question of Native Ameri-

can origins during the racially polarized project of “imagining” the na-

tion of the United States throughout the nineteenth century. Answering

the question of origins was central to continued colonization in North

America; quite simply, Native people had to be explained to be super-

seded (WIN, 5). Since fi rst contact, European Americans have presented

myriad answers to the question, How came America to be fi rst inhabited

by humans? With the rising importance of print capitalism in postrevo-

lutionary America, explanations of Native origins became widely dis-

seminated and consumed by the public and politicians alike. The acces-

sibility of these theories directly infl uenced nineteenth-century popular

sentiments about American Indians and colonial policies regarding their

future. This was most notable with regard to removal policies, which

were aimed at accomplishing one of the essential components of the co-

lonial project of the United States, the territorial dispossession of Indian

436 american indian quarterly/fall 2010/vol. 34, no. 4

lands.1 This process was vital to the colonial project, and it stood in stark

opposition to the fact that it was on the well-being of indigenous lands

that the very survival of indigenous peoples depended.2 Having answers

to the question of Native origins that challenged the magnitude, dura-

tion, and even the very legitimacy of Native Americans’ presence and

tenure in America offered powerful colonial tools for furthering tribal

land dispossession.

In this essay I argue that American Indian authors had a keen un-

derstanding of the political and racial implications the varied answers

European Americans were offering about their origins held for their

communities. By tackling dominant origin theories, they interrupted

the white-supremacist discourse surrounding the topic. Their answers

were crafted delicately so as to be salient to their predominantly white

audiences and yet also actively promote indigenous sovereignty, a sov-

ereignty inherent in peoplehood.3 This peoplehood was “inseparably

linked to sacred traditions, traditional homelands, and a shared history

as indigenous people.”4 With the ongoing colonial project of the United

States attempting to strip indigenous groups of key aspects of their peo-

plehood, including language, sacred history, religion, and land, through

“the means of territorial dispossession, assimilation, religious conver-

sion, or outright extermination,” we can understand their answers,

which sought to protect this peoplehood, as bold acts of resistance.5

My primary focus is on three Anishinaabeg writers: Kahkewaquon-

aby (Peter Jones), Kahgegagahbowh (George Copway), and William

Whipple Warren, who were, for the most part, writing contemporane-

ously (between the mid-1830s and 1850s) and who were each embroiled

in fi ghts against colonial land grabs and removal policies focused on

their communities in Canada and the United States during this pe-

riod.6 These three multifaceted individuals, with their own unique life

histories, were bound by ongoing problems of misrepresentation and

oppression in their communities and their willingness to represent An-

ishinaabeg history and knowledge to white audiences (WIN, 163). Each

tracked contemporary debate and discourse on Native American ori-

gins in North America. In their written works they constructed and dis-

seminated answers to these dilemmas that actively attended to the chal-

lenges of ongoing colonization in their specifi c communities as well as

envisioned a wider Native American sovereignty. Before detailing the

historical context of origin questions in the nineteenth century, I draw

Howey: “The question which has puzzled” 437

brief attention to the tantalizing hints offered to us in the opening quote

from Warren about how these Anishinaabeg authors creatively engaged

with discourse on the question of Native origins.

Warren says the origin question has puzzled and still puzzles the

“learned civilized world,” referring to his predominantly white audience

and, of interest, excluding the subject of his work, the Ojibway, from

being “puzzled” by this question. Indeed, Warren writes that the way

American Indians populated “this important section of the earth” (i.e.,

America) has remained for thousands of years unknown to people of

the “Old World,” informing us that the question of where the Ameri-

can Indian came from “puzzles” European Americans but not the Ojib-

way (HOP, 54). He says that, as for the Ojibway, he can give no more

appropriate information on their belief of their “own fi rst existence”

than to provide a defi nition of the name they have given to their race—

An-ish-in-aub-ag (HOP, 56). Warren defi nes them as “Spontaneous

People” (HOP, 56), indeed, a bold statement, as one of the most highly

respected European American scholarly authorities on American Indi-

ans of the era, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, had defi ned them as “Common

People.” With this statement Warren makes it clear that the Ojibway

have a very specifi c understanding of their origin. They are spontaneous

people, spontaneous meaning indigenous, natural, that is, a people al-

ways in America, and thus there is no puzzle to them about their origin.7

Warren proceeds to go to great lengths to offer his personal explanation

of Ojibway origins, which deals specifi cally with one of the dominant

theories of origins in European American contexts (the “lost tribes of

Israel” theory).

Warren both engages dominant discourse on origin theories as well

as provides this deeply indigenous view of “their own fi rst existence,”

as a people always on their land. Together, this allows him to radically

undermine the very logic of removal, colonial policy aimed at dispos-

sessing his community from their land, which, if successful, would tear

at the survival of his community. Asserting this sense of always present

allows Warren to demonstrate that his community has an abiding peo-

plehood that includes their homelands. This in turn endows them with

an inherent sovereignty that demands respect and protection. I argue

that these three scholars shared this awareness of the devastating impact

a loss of independent homelands would have on Anishinaabeg people-

hood and that they each engaged with origin questions to try to orient


popular discourse on this topic in ways that promoted indigenous sov-

ereignty. With each explicating in some way a sense of always present,

they asserted an indigenous peoplehood, including language, sacred his-

tory, religion, and land, that was basic to survival and identity and wor-

thy of protection.

dominant discourse on native american

origins in nineteenth-century america

The American Indian held a complicated yet central position in the

project of imagining the new nation, the Republic of the United States.8

The revolution of 1776 envisioned a radical break from the past and the

formation of a political system markedly different from that of dynastic

England. Because it was conceived as a break from the metropole, the

revolution left America seeking an identity that was “American.”9 As the

American Indians were distinctly non-European, they became central to

this identity building. Playing Indian “allowed rebellious Americans to

cross and confound boundaries of national identity.”10

While people played Indian to imagine a new American nationalistic

identity, there was always a confl ict between real Indians and these ideo-

logical Indians, who let Americans be savage yet civilized and rebellious

yet ordered. The existence of real Indians had long been fascinating and

mysterious to American colonists, but by the start of the nineteenth cen-

tury they were increasingly seen as hindrances to America’s geopolitical

expansion into Indian Territory. The new patriots came to see them as

enemies of the nation.11 The place of Indians posed major dilemmas for

the emerging republic.12 As a consequence, the nineteenth century saw

the “rapid naturalizing of the epistemology of racial difference in regard

to Native peoples” (WIN, 39).

At the heart of the nationalistic and racially polarized discourse and

debate over this “Indian Problem” was the question of the origin of real

Indians. Native people had to be explained to be superseded (WIN, 5).

The advance of print capitalism was making it possible for rapidly grow-

ing numbers of people to think about themselves and to relate them-

selves to others in profoundly new ways that let them imagine them-

selves as part of an “American” republic.13 While ideas on the origins of

Native Americans had circulated since the earliest history of the Ameri-

can colonies, it was with this increase in print capitalism in the late eigh-


teenth and early nineteenth centuries that views on Native Americans’

geographic and racial origins became widely accessible.

Questions about Native origins, their past activities, and ultimately

their futures intertwined to form a major part of political, social, and

intellectual discussions during the critical developmental sequence of

the United States from the end of the revolution through the close of

the nineteenth century. This era, the heart of the colonial building of

the United States as a nation, was marked by a seemingly ceaseless land

hunger made manifest in removal policies aimed at the territorial dis-

possession of Indian lands.14 Again, this process was diametrically op-

posed to the needs of the indigenous peoples occupying what was now

the United States.

One of the republic’s “founding fathers,” Thomas Jefferson, took great

interest in questions about Native American origins. Jefferson was inter-

ested fi rst in determining whether living Native Americans were con-

nected to the people responsible for the evidence of past activity, namely,

the thousands of earthen burial mounds scattered throughout the Mid-

west and Southeast. To answer this question, Jefferson—or, rather, his

slaves—excavated one such mound in Virginia.15 This work is often

considered the fi rst “modern” archaeological excavation in the United

States, and from it Jefferson concluded that the mounds had been built

by ancestors of living American Indians.

Next, Jefferson was interested in the origins question, asking “from

whence came those aboriginal inhabitants of America?” To address this

issue of Native American origins, Jefferson considered both continen-

tal geography and the language of living Native American groups and

assessed what other living groups Native Americans could be logically

linked to based on these factors. Citing Captain Cook’s fi nding of the

“narrow streight” between Asia and North America combined with

what he saw as resemblances between modern Native American lan-

guages and customs and those of Asia, Jefferson concluded that Native

Americans were most likely connected to Asia. He concluded that “the

resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabit-

ants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the de-

scendants of the latter, or the latter of the former.” Jefferson also asserted

that there is likely a great antiquity to American Indians’ presence in

North America.16

This “scientifi c” approach to the question of Native American origins,


which suggested that their origins were ancient and connected in some

way to Asia, did not satisfy scholarly or public speculations about Native

American origins in the early nineteenth century. Other explanations,

ones based on biblical views and ones promoting less permanence for

Native Americans in America, would continue to circulate and ascend

in popularity. A religious explanation of Native Americans’ origins, that

they had descended from the lost tribes of Israel, had been extant since

early colonial times. Many early British American colonists (including

Cotton Mather, Roger Williams, and William Penn) had accepted the

idea based on observed similarities of Hebrew and American Indian

languages.17 With the increase of print in late-eighteenth-century and

early-nineteenth-century America, this idea gained widening promul-

gation and achieved broader appeal than Jefferson’s “natural history”

approach.

James Adair, who traded and lived with American Indians from 1735

until 1775, published The History of the American Indians in 1775, which

laid out a biblically based argument for Native Americans as descen-

dents of the Hebrews, some of the lost tribes of Israel.18 Although widely

read (Peter Jones owned Adair’s book), Elias Boudinot’s book A Star in

the West, which built directly on Adair’s argument, can be credited with

popularizing this theory in the early nineteenth century (SF, 216). Bou-

dinot (not to be confused with the famous Cherokee leader of the same

name) was a key statesman of the early republic who was president of

the Continental Congress and signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783.19 In 1816

he published A Star in the West: or A Humble Attempt to Discover the

Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, preparatory to their return to their beloved

city, Jerusalem. Boudinot had two goals for “proving” that American In-

dians were the lost tribes of Israel. On the one hand, he wanted to “bring

declarative glory to God.”20 On the other hand, he aimed to show that

Indians were republicans and thus had a place in the new nation—the

poor treatment they had received by the English had made them hostile

and savage, but their true nature was good and holy. Boudinot’s argu-

ment for the American Indians as lost tribes aimed to assert Indians as

worthy of protection in the new republic.

Boudinot supported his arguments by a comparison of Hebrew and

American Indian customs. He looked at each group’s “language, received

traditions, established customs and habits, known religious rites and

ceremonies, and their public worship and religious opinions and preju-


dices.”21 In its review of the book, the Portico pointed out that Boudi-

not’s arguments imagined “a peculiar resemblance between the Jews and

Indians, in particular points, which are applicable in a thousand other

ways, among a thousand different people.”22 Even though this contem-

porary scholarly journal pointed out fl aws in Boudinot’s arguments, the

idea that North America had been originally populated by some of the

ten lost tribes of Israel became one of the most popular explanations

of Indian origins circulating in the nineteenth century.23 Other contem-

porary nineteenth-century scholars expounded on and, thus, further

popularized Boudinot’s ideas. One important example of this was Ethan

Smith’s View of the Hebrews, published fi rst in 1823. Smith draws heavily

on Boudinot and follows his exact logic of comparing lists of traits be-

tween Hebrews and American Indians, and, like Boudinot, he concludes

a need to “restore” the Native Americans because of their heritage as the

lost tribes.24

Connected to ongoing speculation about the origins of Native Ameri-

cans was concern with who exactly built the thousands and thousands

of earthen mounds spread throughout North America. Recall, Jefferson

had concluded these were the result of activities of ancestors of living

Native Americans.25 However, his explanation, coinciding with his “sci-

entifi c” explanation of an ancient and Asian origin for Native Ameri-

cans, failed to gain currency in nineteenth-century America. With ter-

ritorial dispossession of Indian lands a priority, people did not want to

believe that contemporary Native Americans had a capacity for great

works, because it was a lot easier to take land from “savages who could

never use it ‘properly’ than from people who were capable of the level of

culture implied by the great mounds and earthworks.”26 A myth that be-

gan developing in the waning years of the eighteenth century suggested

in fact that these mounds were actually constructed by a white race de-

stroyed by the modern Indians, the “Mound Builder” race, a myth that

would greatly amplify such land grab justifi cations.27 The myth of the

Mound Builders blossomed in the nineteenth century, promoting the

idea that the earthen mounds had been built by a civilized white race

that was then destroyed by red savages.28

The popular lost tribes of Israel theory merged with growing claims

that the earthen mounds in the Midwest and Southeast were actually

constructed by this white Mound Builder race: “In pursuit of ‘white’

forerunners to Native America, the venerable ‘ten lost tribes of Israel,’


once a popular explanation of the Native presence in the Americas,

mutated into a popular explanation of the ‘white’ Mound Builders in

the Americas.”29 Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, produced in 1830 and

widely known in its time, helped develop this merger of the lost tribes

of Israel theory with the Mound Builder myth.30 Joseph Smith was “cer-

tainly exposed to much of the Mound Builder mythology as well as the

prevalent belief in the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” His Book of Mormon en-

capsulated in a well-integrated manner the lines of speculative thought

on Native American origins and mounds circulating during the early

nineteenth century. Smith proposed that North America was settled

by Lehi, a Hebrew who had left Jerusalem and sailed to the Americas

around 600 B.C. Upon arriving, Lehi’s children split into two warring

groups: the kind-hearted, white-skinned, farming, and metal-working

Nephites and the marauding, red-skinned Lamanites, who eventually

overran the Nephites after they had built all the great works in North

America.31

As the theory of the lost tribes amalgamated with the increasingly

popular Mound Builder myth and caught hold in public and political

circles, the fact that the lost tribes theory had originally meant to explain

Native presence in the Americas and secure their place in the republic

was quickly forgotten.32 While Boudinot’s argument for the American

Indians as lost tribes aimed to assert Indians as worthy of protection in

the new republic, as the lost tribes theory was linked into this growing

myth it became connected to a completely opposite political purpose—

the support of Indian removal.

Throughout the nineteenth century the Mound Builder myth was

circulated widely through the mainstream print media and “won broad

acceptance by scholars and the American public.”33 An example of this

myth’s popular appeal can be found in the literary works of William

Cullen Bryant. In 1832 he published his poem “The Prairies,” inspired by

his travels in Illinois, home to one of the largest American Indian chief-

doms and mound centers in the New World (Cahokia). In the poem he

embeds the Mound Builder myth:

And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds

That overlook the rivers, or that rise

In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,

Answer. A race, that long has passed away,


Built them;—a disciplined and populous race. . . .

The red man came—

The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fi erce,

And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

The solitude of centuries untold

Has settled where they dwelt.34

This myth, wildly popular in the nineteenth century, was not dismissed

by the scholarly community until 1894, when anthropologist Cyrus

Thomas, sponsored by the Smithsonian, demonstrated and exten-

sively disseminated the knowledge that American Indians had built the

mounds.35 Although modern archaeologists consider this to be the end

of the debate, this was hardly true in terms of the theory’s popular ac-

ceptance, and, in fact, this theory still circulates in some cult archaeol-

ogy circles today.36

This myth stood in clear opposition to Jefferson’s conclusions about

who built the mounds, but it was more convenient in the political world

of the nineteenth century, as it directly appealed to American sentiments

and furthered the colonial project of the expansion of the United States.

The colonial justifi cations emerging from the Mound Builder myth are

obvious: if Indians killed a white race, the white race was justifi ed in

killing or removing them. This political ramifi cation certainly helped

the myth circulate and ascend to such popularity. In particular, fron-

tiersmen who were eager to fulfi ll Manifest Destiny were very support-

ive of this myth, as they stood to gain economically from the removal of

Indians from their original lands.37

The ultimate political use of this myth came from President Andrew

Jackson, who employed it as he argued for passage of the Indian Re-

moval Act of 1830. In his First Annual Message to Congress, December 8,

1830, Jackson stated:

Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this

country, and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devis-

ing means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been

arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared

from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to

tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy refl ections.

But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it

does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.


In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over

the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once

powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make

room for the existing savage tribes.38

Popular and often wildly speculative ideas on Native American ori-gins infi ltrated the American public as well as major scholars and politi-cians of the nineteenth century. These various speculations and theories on Native American origins directly shaped American colonial policies and, consequently, American Indian lives in the nineteenth century. Ex-planations of Native American origins that undermined their connec-tion to America, like the Mound Builder theory, which gained such pop-ularity, helped propagate hateful and racist ideas and justify the physical removal of American Indians from their lands, this territorial dispos-session being one of the essential components of the colonial project that was the building of America.39 The Mound Builder myth allowed the removal of tribes from their homelands to be recast and envisioned as appropriate vengeance “on behalf of that great and martyred ancient culture.”40 American Indian scholars of the nineteenth century held po-sitions in these speculations and debates, and I now turn to an examina-tion of the ways three Anishinaabeg writers engaged with this dominant discourse surrounding origins.41

three anishinaabeg authors challenge

nineteenth-century origin discourse

Three nineteenth-century writers—Kahkewaquonaby (Peter Jones), Kahgegagahbowh (George Copway), and William Whipple Warren—were intimately concerned with removal policies of the era and left “a record of living and thinking at a point of radical change for Native peo-ples, a change that was diffi cult enough for people to live through, more diffi cult still to represent in English” (WIN, 189). All three wrote after the Indian Removal Act (1830) had been passed, after the lost tribes myth amalgamated with the Mound Builder myth, which was used in sup-port of Indian removal, and during times when each of their commu-nities faced mounting pressure on their homelands. They moved freely and adeptly among various disciplines as they conducted their written

examinations and articulations of their (and their communities’) posta-

pocalyptic situations.42 All three engaged the dominant discourse on the


geographic and racial origins of American Indians to “undercut white

versions of the progressive evolutionary narrative” that was forecasting

the vanishing of Native Americans.43

In approaching American Indian authors, there has been scholarly

concern that “since neither English nor writing is ‘native’ to Native

Americans, the fact that Native peoples write in English detracts from

the Indianness of the literatures” (WIN, 29). As Arnold Krupat notes,

even though Native Americans had developed “writing” in a broad

sense, “the letter and the book, were not found among native cultures

in the precontact period.”44 Thus, Krupat has suggested that writing will

always signify “for the Indian the cultural other” and that perhaps it is

oration that is the only true Indian literature.45 Krupat has suggested

that Indian writings should be seen as bicultural composite composi-

tions; while written by Indians interested in the old ways, Indian writing

is written by authors who have become “extremely sophisticated in their

manipulation of new—Euramerican, written—ways.”46

Indeed, each of the Native authors I consider in this essay occupied

multivalent (bicultural and beyond) positions in nineteenth-century

America, and the transmission of their writing was undoubtedly im-

pacted by the experience of colonization. I remain aware of the chal-

lenges Womack poses by asking how much these authors sought to

please a white audience and what we make of an author “who is pur-

posefully writing to satisfy white stereotypes.”47 Native authors of the

nineteenth century left an intellectual history that was often “skewed”

(given their literacy and positions in American society) in favor of Native

integration into American society.48 Recognizing this, I agree we must

keep in mind that “the written record cannot fully account for a varied

and powerful tradition of American Indian resistance.”49 I brought these

considerations to my study of these Native-authored works.

However, I follow the lead of scholars like Weaver, Womack, Warrior,

Senier, Konkle, and Brooks, who assert that too much time has been

wasted trying to dissect whether a given writer is “really an Indian.”50

This has led the ways in which Indian literature as an essential means

of struggle, of resistance, has been overlooked. Womack directly chal-

lenges the ethnocentric bias at the heart of setting the standard for an

authentic Indian literature as oration, a move aimed at upholding “cul-

tural purity,” stating that “Indian cultures are the only cultures where

it is assumed that if they change they are no longer a culture. In most


other cultures, change is viewed as a sign that the culture is vibrant and

alive, capable of surviving.”51

Early American Indian authors “creatively responded to forced colo-

nization” by using writing as an adaptive tool or map for communal ac-

tivity, resistance, sovereignty.52 It was critical for American Indians, faced

with continued colonialism and the ceaseless land hunger of whites, to

learn and manipulate English in order to preserve themselves; American

Indians of the nineteenth century wrote their own histories and tradi-

tions to write themselves into a political future (WIN, 38). As Weaver

eloquently states, “They write that the People might live.”53

This model of American Indian writing as a form of resistance and

as a means of directly promoting indigenous nationhood and sover-

eignty is useful for considering the ways these three nineteenth-century

Anishinaabeg writers engaged origin questions. Drawing on this con-

ceptual framework, we can approach these three nineteenth-century

Anishinaabeg writers as active contributors to this critical sociopoliti-

cal debate in nineteenth-century North America. Tackling origin ques-

tions in print was essential work against the grain of the increasingly

“dominant social ideology” that Native Americans were recent and even

illegitimate occupants of America.54 These three scholars shared a deep

awareness of the devastating impact that having no independent tribal

lands would have on Anishinaabeg peoplehood and their inherent sov-

ereignty. While each engaged with questions of Native American origins

differently, each did so in a way that tried to orient popular discourse on

this topic around the promotion of indigenous sovereignty. Each, even

if subtly, provided a sense of his community as always present in Amer-

ica, a move that establishes an unquestionable peoplehood for his com-

munity, which in turn works to endow that community with an inher-

ent sovereignty demanding respect and protection. We can understand

these three were practicing what Weaver calls “communitism,” a combi-

nation of “community” and “activism,” with their writing on the origins

issue by using always to promote sovereignty. Always asserted not just

that “the People might live” but that they deserved to live and to live

with all aspects of their peoplehood intact—their language, sacred his-

tory, religion, and, perhaps most pressingly, their land, things that had

been theirs from time immemorial.55

Before turning to this discussion I note that beyond taking into ac-

count issues surrounding the creation and production of written forms,


I also paid attention to culture-specifi c boundaries and the infl uence

these had on the ways I read and understood the Others (the Ameri-

can Indian authors).56 I do not pretend to, nor am I in any position to,

resolve the issues surrounding the writing and reading of American In-

dian writers, but I worked to remain aware of some of the key issues in-

volved with both of these processes.

kahkewaquonaby (peter jones)

Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby, meaning “Sacred Feathers”) was born in

1802 in Burlington Heights near Hamilton, Ontario, part of the Credit

River Indian community. He was the son of Augustus Jones, a retired

surveyor of Welsh descent who was trusted by the Mississauga, and Tuh-

benahneequay, the daughter of a Mississauga chief. Augustus had two

wives, Kahkewaquonaby’s mother, who was Mississauga and was not a

Christian convert, and another, who was Iroquoian and was a Christian

convert. Wary of losing his social standing for having two wives, which

went against European American social and religious norms, Augustus

cut ties with his Mississauga wife, lived with his Iroquoian wife, and

farmed. Kahkewaquonaby was raised by his mother and trained in tra-

ditional Mississauga ways until 1816, when his father began to teach him

the “settled” life. This is the year he became Peter Jones (SF, chaps. 1–3).

Peter Jones is perhaps most well known for his devotion to Christian-

ity and the Wesleyan Methodist Church. He was baptized Anglican in

1820 but did not actually convert internally; he was born again in 1823.

He became devoted to the Methodist Church and was a key mission-

ary among the Mississauga for the church. His “intercultural skills made

Christianity familiar and accessible to his native audience,” and he was

a highly successful missionary (SF, 84). Viewing conversion of his tribal

community to Methodism, which preached sobriety and settled life, as

the best hope for their perseverance, Jones returned to Credit River and

began converting his family and friends. He began moving his mission-

ary message outward among the Ojebway throughout Canada, including

to Rice Lake. Here, some of his most signifi cant converts were the par-

ents of George Copway. The young Copway, sixteen years Jones’s junior,

became his treasured student. The two were closely connected, as Cop-

way married a close friend of Jones’s wife and became a Native Meth-

odist minister. Copway assisted Jones in his missionary efforts among


their shared tribal communities. Copway was exiled from the Methodist

Church in 1846 for fi nancial impropriety, a personal and professional

blow to Jones that ended their close relationship.

Although Jones has been considered (and dismissed) by some as a

fully assimilated Christian Indian, as Weaver observes, a review of his

life and work discloses a different picture of a passionate defender of

Native rights, a promoter of sovereignty.57 Peter Jones followed the re-

moval process in the United States very closely because he knew this

issue would come to Canada. Right before he left for his fi rst tour of

England in 1830 to raise money for his Methodist mission in Canada,

he knew Andrew Jackson had been elected president. This development

worried Jones, who was deeply opposed to removal. While in England

he met Eliza Fields, whom he married and who became a key aid in

his missionary efforts. Upon his return to North America Jones became

depressed by the racism he saw emerging from the governmental poli-

cies of the United States and British Canada as well as in his own church

(SF, 152–53). He continued to closely follow the implementation of the

Indian Removal Act in the United States, with particular interest in the

case of the Cherokee. (Since he saw settled Indian life as preventing re-

moval, their fate greatly interested him.)

Seeing the impending reality of Cherokee removal, by the mid to late

1830s Jones became even more convinced that to avoid a similar fate,

a complete removal from their homeland, the Ojebway had to secure

title deeds to their land. He envisioned a multistep process for securing

lands; most immediately, he wanted title deeds for all existing reserves,

and then he wanted to see a place of refuge for all Great Lakes Indi-

ans (American and Canadian) established in the Saugeen Tract in Up-

per Canada (SF, 171–72). Indeed, the harsh removal of southern Indians

in the United States was leading many tribal people from the U.S. Great

Lakes region to come to Canada in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and

American Indian hating and associated policies were weighing heavily

on Canadian tribal communities’ minds.

In 1838 Jones went to England for the second time to secure deeds for

Credit River. Although he met with Queen Victoria herself, who prom-

ised the deeds, they never materialized. By the early 1840s his hope for

securing lands and having a united tribal homeland had diminished,

and his health had deteriorated. The Credit River Mississauga left for

Owen Sound in the mid-1840s, and by the close of that decade almost


no fertile lands remained in any Ojebway hands (SF, 212). Despite these

major setbacks, Peter Jones continued to fi ght for tribal rights, turn-

ing his attention to education and making yet another trip to England,

this time to raise money for a tribal residential school in 1845. He left

Credit River and in 1851 moved to Echo Village, where he continued to

read current European American work on Native Americans, collecting

a notable library (SF, 216). He died in 1856, and many Mississauga at-

tended his funeral. Jones never lost the respect of his people, and while

he sought to refashion his community following white guidelines, he

did so to promote their survival, their sovereignty.58

Jones had many items published during his lifetime, most of which

pertained to his role as a clergyman and missionary, namely, sermons

and speeches. After his death in 1856 his wife collected his diaries and

notes and supervised the publication of two books: Life and Journals of

Kah-ke-wa-quo-nÙ-by (Rev. Peter Jones), Wesleyan Missionary (1860)

and History of the Ojebway Indians; with Especial Reference to Their Con-

version to Christianity (1861). Jones had begun writing History in the

1830s and had stopped working on it by 1845 because he was too ill to

continue (WIN, 181). While Jones may have read Copway’s work, the

temporal sequence informs us that History was an independent account;

it was not a response to Copway.59

As discussed previously, Peter Jones followed contemporary dominant

discourse on American Indians throughout his life and was actively con-

cerned with issues of removal and Native sovereignty. He read books on

Native Americans by European American “experts,” adeptly citing such

work throughout History. He gives quite lengthy consideration to the

issue of Native American origins in chapter 2 of History of the Ojebway

Indians. The way he engages this topic indicates that he closely followed

the debates about origins, and he understood and actively responded to

the political implications of different theories. Jones’s method of tack-

ling the issue of origins combined a tone that could be digested by a pre-

dominantly white audience, an adept engagement with the dominant

discourse, and an accommodation of the indigenous view of always; this

combination challenges removal.

Chapter 2 of History is titled “Ideas of Their Origins,” and the sub-

jects covered are “Tradition of Nanahbozhooo—My own opinion as to

their origin—reasons for not supposing them descended from the ten

lost tribes of Israel—Desire that this subject should be inquired into”


(HOW, 31–38). Jones begins this chapter on origins by dedicating fi ve

pages to the Ojebway’s own version of their origin. He states that “for

several years past I have made it a subject of inquiry among the aged

sachems of the Ojebway nation of Indians,—What are the opinions

entertained by them, and transmitted from our forefathers, regarding

the origin of our race?” (HOW, 31). He discusses how some tribes “be-

lieve that a great man, endued with the spirit of the gods, by the name

Nanahbozhoo (the meaning of which is now lost) made the world and

the Indians in America” (HOW, 32, emphasis added). He then dedicates

the next three and a half pages to this story (and a total of fi ve and a half

pages of the chapter to tribal versions of their origin and only two and

a half to dominant theories of their origin). Although he concludes his

section on their origin stories with a dismissal, stating that “many of

their traditions are founded on dreams, which will account for the nu-

merous absurd stories current amongst them” (HOW, 36), the dispro-

portionate amount of time he gives to their origin, one that asserts the

Indian was made in America, asserts a people who were always present,

is signifi cant.

After his lengthy consideration of the Ojebway’s own stories Jones

turns to dominant theories. He engages the lost tribes of Israel the-

ory, stating that “much has of late years been said and written on the

theory of the North American Indians having descended from the ten

lost tribes of Israel. There are many things to favour this opinion, and

many against it. When I read the book called ‘The Star in the West,’ and

‘Smith’s View of the Hebrews,’ I was strongly inclined to favour the the-

ory” (HOW, 37). Jones shows he has followed the dominant discourse

on the topic of Native origins and has read Boudinot’s as well as Smith’s

infl uential work, in which each argues that Native Americans are de-

scended from the lost tribes of Israel to assert their place in the repub-

lic. Indeed, Donald Smith notes that in his early sermons Jones often

drew similarities between the Hebrews and Native Americans to make

the Holy Bible more accessible to tribal communities. One wonders if

Jones’s early inclination to favor this theory was in part inspired by see-

ing fellow American Indian author William Apess support the lost tribes

theory proposed by Boudinot in his autobiography, A Son of the Forest:

The Experience of William Apess, a Native of the Forest. Most of Apess’s

appendix supports the version of the theory laid out by Boudinot be-

cause Boudinot’s argument demanded a place for Native Americans in


the republic.60 Although Jones does not directly cite Apess, it is clear that

Jones seriously considered this version of the lost tribes theory, which

promoted the belief that Indians deserved a place in the colonial world.

However, at some point Jones fi nds problems with this theory:

Certainly many of the customs and sacrifi ces of the Indians re-

semble very much those of the children of Israel, such as observing

days of purifi cation, offering the fi rst-fruits of the earth, burnt of-

ferings, and reckoning time by moons. But, on the other hand, they

have no Sabbaths, no circumcision, no altars erected, and no dis-

tinction between clean and unclean animals. It would seem almost

impossible for the descendents of the Israelites ever to have lost

the recollection of their Sabbath days, and the rite of circumcision,

both of which were so solemnly enjoined upon them. (HOW, 37)

Instead, he supports a new theory, one that, despite his devout Christi-

anity, is very secular (the theory that Jefferson supported in his “natural

history” approach), the idea that the Native Americans were of Asiatic

origin: “From all I have heard and read on the subject, I am inclined to

favour the opinion that the Indians are descendents of the Asiatic Tar-

tars, as there appears to me a more striking similarity in features, cus-

toms, and manners, between them and my countrymen than any other

nation” (HOW, 37). One of the striking similarities Jones points to as

key to changing his mind was mound building (HOW, 251). By suggest-

ing Native Americans are descendents of Tartars, Jones dismantles the

Mound Builder myth, giving American Indians proper credit as con-

structers of the mounds. The progress in Jones’s thinking about Native

origins suggests that although the idea of a religious connection between

Native Americans and Hebrews appealed to his Christian sensibilities

(he had discussed that connection in his sermons), he was aware that

the lost tribes of Israel theory had been linked with the Mound Builder

myth, which was used to support removal. Thus, he endorsed a theory

that argued against this, even though it is specifi cally secular.

Further evidence that Jones was acutely aware of and opposed to the

damaging implications that the confl ation of the Mound Builder myth

and the lost tribes of Israel theory held for American Indians comes

from a short anecdote in History that condemns the Book of Mormon. As

stated previously, the Book of Mormon was partly responsible for con-

fl ating these two ideas during the peak of the removal era. Chapter 17


of Jones’s History is entitled “The Capacity of the Indians for Receiv-

ing Instruction” and contains several short poems and stories by Ameri-

can Indians to prove this capacity. One of these, “The Mormon Book

and an Indian,” begins with a converted Indian on the Bay of Quinty

passing through a white settlement and hearing a preacher “extolling

another book he called the Mormon Bible.” At the end of his sermon

the preacher opens the fl oor for questions, and all the whites sit quietly.

Shocked by the lack of outrage from the whites, the converted Indian

asks to speak.

A great many winters ago, the Great Spirit gave his good book Bible

to the white man, over the great waters. He took it, and read it, and

it make his heart all over very glad. By-and-by, white man come

over to this country, and brought the good book with him. He gave

it to poor Indian. He hear it, and understand it, and it make his

heart very glad too. But when the Great Spirit gave his good book

to white man, the evil spirit Muhje-munedoo try to make one too,

and he try to make it like the one the Good Spirit made, but he

could not; and then he got so ashamed of it, he go into the woods,

dig a hole in the ground, and then he hide his book. After lying

there many winters, Joe Smith go and dig it up. This is the book

this preacher has been talking about. I hold fast on the good old Bi-

ble, which has made my heart so happy. I have nothing to do with

the devil’s book. (HOW, 198–99)

Signifi cant for its clear condemnation of the Book of Mormon, this short

story includes another interesting aspect. Jones tells us it is an Indian

who has the bravery to stand up to the preacher and promote true

Christianity while the whites sit and say nothing. With this, Jones paints

Indians as more Christian than whites and makes a strong statement

about how Indians can stand up to dominant discourse on their origins

and their removal, calling the Book of Mormon, with its racial, white-

supremacist implications of mound building, the “devil’s book.” This is

a clever critique and a perhaps subtle but still salient attack on the idea

of a white race of Mound Builders.

Jones’s engagement with the question of origins is extremely inter-

esting. He gives many details on the Ojebway’s own version of events,

which promotes the idea that they were made in America. They know

themselves as a people who were always present in America. By describ-


ing this, Jones is acknowledging that they had an abiding peoplehood

“inseparably linked to sacred traditions, traditional homelands, and a

shared history as indigenous people.”61 Through establishing their peo-

plehood, he establishes their sovereignty, since “sovereignty is inherent

in peoplehood.”62 Although he dismisses their versions of their origin

as inaccurate, we can ask if this was a move to please his white audience

more than an accurate representation of his deepest feelings on the mat-

ter. He then proceeds to directly challenge dominant European Ameri-

can theories of his day, rejecting the lost tribes of Israel theory after it

was connected to the Mound Builder myth and removal in the United

States, and he condemns the Book of Mormon, which furthered this. He

then lays out a secular theory of origins that directly credits American

Indians as the builders of the mounds. The progress of his thoughts on

the subject make it clear he followed the contemporary debate and that

his engagement with the topic can be understood as resistance.

kahgegagahbowh (george copway)

George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh) was born in 1818 near the mouth of

the Trent River in Ontario. A son of John Copway, a Mississauga chief,

he belonged to the Mississauga band from near Rice Lake just north of

Cobourg on Lake Ontario. As mentioned previously, his parents were

converted to Christianity in 1827 by Peter Jones and his Mississauga

Methodists. Copway converted to Christianity in the early 1830s and by

1834 was participating in Methodist missionization efforts. In the sum-

mer of 1840 he married Elizabeth Howell, a white woman and friend of

the wife of Peter Jones. He and Elizabeth spent two years in Minnesota,

between 1840 and 1842, trying to bring Christianity to the Upper Mis-

sissippi Ojibway in an area that was a major confl ict zone between the

Sioux and Ojibway. Copway and Elizabeth moved their mission several

times, eventually settling at Fond du Lac, at the head of Lake Superior.63

In 1842 Peter Jones wrote Copway, asking him to return to mission work

with the Mississauga in Canada.64 Copway was accused of fraud by the

tribal communities in which he was missionizing and was exiled from

the Methodist Church in 1846.

After his expulsion (and a short prison term) he went to the United

States, where he had a brief explosion of fame as a writer and Indian

lecturer-performer. He was a prolifi c writer, publishing three books,


several newspaper articles, and several pamphlets and briefl y running

his own newspaper.65 Copway’s fi rst book, his autobiography, The Life,

Letters, and Speeches of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, or G. Copway, Chief Ojib-

way Nation, was published in 1847. In 1850 Copway published The Tra-

ditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation. Both

of these works show he was fl uent with dominant scholarly and popu-

lar discourse on Native Americans, citing adeptly the works of proto-

anthropologists like Lewis Cass and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. In fact,

unlike Jones, Copway took an overt, or what we could call an anthro-

pological approach, to his work, striving to follow methods in collect-

ing information. In Traditional History he refers to collecting oral tra-

ditions and notes by writing that “there are rules to follow by which to

determine whether they are true or false. By these rules I have been gov-

erned in my researches.”66 He was in turn well regarded in the contem-

porary intellectual sphere; when his second book was published he re-

ceived personal accolades from the likes of Washington Irving, Thomas

McKenny, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and John Lloyd Stephens.67 It is

notable that he also kept abreast of the work of contemporary fellow

Anishinaabeg writer William Warren, including in Traditional History a

long excerpt from a publication of Warren’s that appeared in the Min-

nesota Pioneer.68

Copway seemed to have a knack for self-promotion, and some of

the events of his fame make him seem more like a man pursuing a life

of leisure than an avid Indian advocate (WIN, 191). Although he was

fl amboyant and self-promoting, Copway’s writings and public actions

still show he was deeply invested in Native American sovereignty as he

struggled to record and explain the key political moment the Ojibway

found themselves in the middle of the nineteenth century, battling for

their homelands in the face of modernity and the continuous tide of

removal (WIN, 191). A brief discussion of his work and an exploration

of the way he handled the question of Native American origins illustrate

these aspects of his writing.

In chapter 15 of his autobiography Copway recounts the fi rsthand ex-

perience he had with U.S. removal efforts among the Ojibway during his

time in western Ojibway territory when he was present for the Treaty of

1842 at La Pointe. He says it is from the time of this treaty that he can

“date the dissipation, misery, and ruin, of this part of our nation” and

lays out why this treaty was so negative:


1. Because it induced speculators to visit them yearly to sell their

goods at enormous prices; and their whiskey, which inevitably ru-

ins both body and soul.

2. Because it opens the door for all sorts of unprincipled men and

vagabonds. The miners, too, many of whom are no better than

pickpockets.

3. Because, in possessing so much money, without any correct views

of economy, utility, or prudence, it becomes to them “the root of all

evil”—a curse instead of a blessing.69

Copway’s critique of whites and the impact of this treaty continues; he accuses a large majority of whites of “continually laying plans by which they can extort from these unlettered and ignorant Indians, whatever they possess.”70 His condemnation of this treaty is complete, and he places the blame squarely with whites. William Whipple Warren, age seventeen, and his father, Lyman Warren, were present for the negotia-tion of this treaty. It was here that William got his start as an interpreter for the U.S. government (WWW, 23).

In the same year Copway’s autobiography was published, the United States concluded another major treaty with the Ojibway that set out even more clearly the U.S. government’s removal goals. With the Treaty of 1847 the United States sought to remove and concentrate the Chip-pewa on the land west of the Mississippi as soon as possible, making room for the incoming white population and providing land for two tribes whose removal had already been decided, the Winnebago and the Menominee (WWW, 35). William Warren was a key interpreter for the U.S. government at this treaty negotiation. Although the removal plans laid out in this treaty failed, 1847 marked the beginning of perpetual re-moval efforts on the part of the United States among the Ojibway that would ultimately end in their removal to the White Earth Reservation in 1868.

Copway responded to these removal efforts in print and lectures throughout the eastern United States. He advocated his plan for a sepa-rate Indian state (named after himself) whereby all tribes in the eastern United States would be concentrated on a large tract of land west of the Mississippi (in the heart of the territory populated by the Sioux, the Ojibway’s enemies). Copway proposed that Indians would eventually form their own government and gain statelike status. Copway felt that

a separate Indian state would secure many advantages for the Indians:


“Poverty would be unknown, plenty would reign, and cheerfulness aid

them in their work.”71 His plan had many similarities to one proposed

by James Doty, the governor of Minnesota, during the time Copway

was missionizing there and during the negotiation of the Treaty of 1842.

Doty’s plan failed to gain support, as did Copway’s transformed version

several years later.72

In 1850 Copway published The Traditional History and Characteristic

Sketches of the Ojibway Nation. By this time the U.S. government’s plans

to dispossess the Ojibway of their homelands were abundantly clear;

on October 11, 1849, only seven months after the Minnesota territory

had been created, “the legislature passed resolution to evoke Chippe-

wa’s rights to hunt, gather and fi sh in ceded lands as guaranteed in Ar-

ticle 5 of the treaty of 1837 and to remove them from all lands to which

their title had been extinguished” (WWW, 82). The government asked

the bands to move to Sandy Lake in the winter of 1850 to receive their

annuities, and while waiting there, several Ojibway died. Although this

second attempt at removal failed, it showed that the United States was

unapologetic about its “forward” progress and removal plans. Copway

was aware of the ongoing removal attempts among the Ojibway in the

United States, and his criticism of whites in this book was much more

aggressive than in his autobiography.73

Copway’s addressing of the Native origin question in these two books

also refl ected these political changes. He only directly engages domi-

nant European American theories on the origin question in his autobi-

ography:

My readers will then be able to judge whether we are to be identi-

fi ed with the dispersed and “lost tribes of Israel.” Can it be possible

that, had we sprung from any of the Hebrew tribes, we should be

so completely ignorant of a Messiah, a Sabbath, or a single vestige

of the Levitical Law? But enough of this for the present.74

As discussed previously, by 1847 the lost tribes theory had amalgam-

ated with the Mound Builder myth, which was used to support removal.

Copway, writing after this, was clearly skeptical of arguments that the

Indians were the lost tribes of Israel. He follows his skeptical dismissal

of this theory with what I think can be interpreted as a statement about

Ojibway origins that promotes them as always present, as then having a

peoplehood with inherent sovereignty: “As far as I am able to learn, our


nation has never been conquered; and have maintained their ground

wherever they have conquered.”75 We see him establish they were never

conquered—they have always maintained their ground, always present

on and holding their land. It is clear Copway does not spend much time

trying to engage and disassociate European American theories on Na-

tive origins from removal, as Jones does. Instead, he simply dismisses

the claims and focuses on telling his and his people’s story.

In Traditional History in 1850, after removal was in full swing among

the Ojibway and after numerous Ojibway had died at Sandy Lake, Cop-

way did not engage with dominant European American theories on Na-

tive origins. He instead focused his effort on relating Native Americans’

own stories, humanizing them to the public, and arguing for their place in

the United States. Copway dedicates several chapters of this book to pre-

senting the Ojibway’s own view of their origin, their historical tales, and

their religious beliefs.76 We see a shift, a sense of urgency rising in Copway

in this second work for telling their history and their version of events (in

fact, eight of the seventeen chapters in this book start with “their”). Al-

though detailing the Ojibway worldview does not directly confront domi-

nant discourse on the origin question, it nevertheless challenges this dis-

course by serving as a countermythology to European American myths

about Native origins and Native Americans’ destiny to vanish.77

Copway’s approach to the question of Native origins in his writings

responded to the rapidly changing political circumstances of the Ojib-

way in nineteenth-century America. Over time the actions of the gov-

ernment toward American Indians, and his tribal community in partic-

ular, pushed him personally and politically to become a stronger critic of

whites and a proponent of indigenous rights. This is evident in his writ-

ings and his approach to origin questions. Although he is well versed in

the dominant theories of the day and acknowledges the lost tribes of Is-

rael theory, Copway chooses to focus his energy on promoting the Ojib-

way’s own traditions and views. By informing his (white) audience that

the indigenous perspective of their origin is that they never have been

conquered, he is asserting that the Ojibway are a people who always held

their land, who had their own fundamental peoplehood and inherent

sovereignty deriving from this basic reality. This approach undermined

nineteenth-century colonial removal logic, which, as we have seen, in-

cluded justifying land grabs based on theories of Native origins that dis-

credited Native Americans’ tenure in and connection to America.


william whipple warren

William Whipple Warren was born on May 27, 1825, at La Pointe on

Lake Superior. He had a notable pedigree as the son of Lyman Warren,

a Mayfl ower descendent who became a major Lake Superior trader, and

Mary Cadotte, whose father, Michel, was a trader married to the daugh-

ter of Waub-ij-e-jauk, chief of the Crane clan of the Chequamegon re-

gion (WWW, 1). Warren spent his youth at La Pointe amidst a close-knit

mixed Ojibway and white trading community where the principal lan-

guage was Ojibwe (WWW, 7). When he was eleven he went with his pa-

ternal grandfather to New York for schooling. He returned to the Lake

Superior region in 1841.

As mentioned previously, the Treaty of 1842 at La Pointe cast War-

ren into what would become his (albeit short) lifelong role, that of an

interpreter and intercultural broker between the U.S. government and

the Ojibway community (including the mixed bloods, of which he was

one). Alfred Bunson had just been appointed subagent for La Pointe

in October 1842 and missed the treaty negotiations. In December 1842

he spent three weeks in the Warren home at La Pointe, where William

served as his offi cial interpreter for tribes coming to complain about the

treaty from October (their major complaints were that the treaty did

not provide for mixed bloods and that it raised the prospect of removal)

(WWW, 23–24). William remained as an interpreter for the U.S. govern-

ment based out of La Pointe until after the Treaty of 1847. During this

time at La Pointe he gained an interest in Ojibway stories and collected

them from elders. After helping serve as an interpreter on the Treaty of

1847, Warren moved to work with Henry Rice, an infl uential fur trader

who had been a key U.S. representative in these treaty negotiations, at

Crow Wing on the Mississippi.

Concurrently in 1847, the U.S. Senate authorized the Indian depart-

ment to conduct a vast ethnological survey of the Indian tribes, which

was supervised by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft sent 350 ques-

tions and census forms to Indian departments for distribution. Henry

Rice passed the forms on to Warren, who worked among the Missis-

sippi and Pillager bands of Ojibway. This work shifted Warren from

storyteller to tribal historian and, one could argue, auto-anthropologist

(WWW, 65). Like Copway, he became concerned with developing meth-

ods for collecting information, even to the point of writing Schoolcraft


to ask for training and offering his services (WWW, 166–67). Henry Rice

submitted Warren’s answers to the ethnology survey inquiries, which

were published in the Minnesota Pioneer (and cited by Copway in Tradi-

tional History) (WWW, 54).78

In 1851 Warren was elected to the Minnesota State Legislature. Here

he was encouraged by his fellow legislator and editor of the Minnesota

Democrat, Col. D. A. Robertson, to publish his history of the Ojibway

people. A series of articles ran in this newspaper throughout 1851 and

formed the basis for History of the Ojibway People, which Warren fi n-

ished in 1852. After fi nishing this book, Warren went to New York to fi nd

a publisher (and to see doctors, as his health was failing). He was turned

down by every publisher and died on his return to Minnesota in 1853

at the age of twenty-eight. This work was almost forgotten, published

posthumously only in 1885 by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Warren’s entrance in 1851 to the legislature occurred just after the in-

cident at Sandy Creek and in the midst of still another removal effort

among the Ojibway, this time to remove the Ojibway from Wisconsin

and consolidate them in Minnesota Territory. Warren was a vocal critic

of the Sandy Lake incident, although his insider government perspective

led him to believe that removal was inevitable. Warren chose to become

involved in assisting the U.S. government with this second removal ef-

fort, encouraging the government to proceed in ways he felt would avoid

similar negative consequences for the Ojibway as well as trying to secure

good lands west of the Mississippi for the relocation.

Although Warren was publicly involved as a government agent in re-

moval, the evidence suggests that his private view can hardly be consid-

ered a full endorsement of U.S. removal policy. In a letter to his cousin

on July 6, 1851, that he marked as “private,” Warren confesses he had

felt “somewhat dubious” about taking an offi cial position in the gov-

ernment’s newest removal plans (WWW, 127). However, he writes that

he chose to be involved so that he could promote his plan for Ojibway

unity. He envisioned that when they were removed to this area, all of

the Ojibway (and mixed bloods) could unite as a single tribe, which

would allow them to be able to bargain with the government from a

position of strength. In this letter to his cousin he cries that “united ac-

tion” must be the Ojibway motto (WWW, 127–28).79 He feels that if he

could share his plan with the Ojibway, they would agree to remove faster

so they could unite and fi ght the U.S. government. Warren’s position on


removal combined a practical acceptance of what he saw as impossible

to avoid (which it turned out to be) with a strong desire to develop a

means to maintain some semblance of Native sovereignty in the face of

continuous threats against it.

Warren was dedicated to being a bridge between the Ojibway and

the U.S. government, working to promote faithfully the views of the

Ojibway, including their antiremoval feelings, to the government and

yet also secure a place for them in the expanding country by assisting

with removal policies. Unlike Copway and Jones, Warren never slides

into familiar terms for the Ojibway in his writing, never calling them

his “brethren,” never using “our,” never claiming it as his history too;

instead, he always keeps some distance. Indeed, he always identifi ed as

a mixed blood and never as an Ojibway in his lifetime (WWW, viii).

However, Warren also repeatedly claims that his sharing of blood and

language made him uniquely positioned to be an authority on Ojibway

history, and, as previously mentioned, he was willing to challenge Eu-

ropean American scholars’ accounts of the Ojibway on this basis (WIN,

199). That he occupied multiple, even confl icting, spheres in his life,

negotiating public and private identities and feelings, is manifested in

his writing, including his positions on the question of Native origins. If

this situation leads some to pause and ask if he should be considered an

American Indian author, we must conclude that he should be, for he al-

ways held a proactive commitment to his community and the wider Na-

tive American community and always prioritized Native perseverance

and sovereignty.80 As hinted at in the opening of this article, the way

Warren engages the question of Native origins in History shows us ex-

actly this—he demonstrates intellectual familiarity with dominant dis-

course on the subject, awareness of the political implications of origin

theories circulating in the mainstream, and a desire to present the indig-

enous view of “their own fi rst existence,” that of always present but in a

way digestible to white audiences (dismissing it while reifying it). This

combination allows him to undermine the utility of dominant theories

on Native origins in supporting removal.

Warren begins his dialogue with the origins question in chapter 3 of

History of the Ojibway People, “Origin of the Ojibways.” Again, Warren

writes that the origin question has puzzled and still puzzles the “learned

civilized world,” referring to his predominantly white audience and, of

most interest, excluding the subject of his work, the Ojibway, from being


“puzzled” by this question. Warren begins this chapter with a discussion

of the “beliefs of the Ojibways respecting their origin.” Again, he writes

that as for the Ojibway, he can give no more appropriate information

on their belief of their “own fi rst existence” than to provide a defi nition

of the name they have given to their race, An-ish-in-aub-ag (HOP, 56).

Warren defi nes them as “Spontaneous People,” indeed a bold statement,

as one of the most highly respected European American scholarly au-

thorities on American Indians of the era, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, had

defi ned them as “Common People” (HOP, 56). With this statement War-

ren makes it clear that the Ojibway have a very specifi c understanding of

their origin. They are spontaneous people, spontaneous meaning indig-

enous, natural, that is, always present in America. There is no puzzle to

them. This bold assertion of always present declares that the Ojibway

understand themselves as having a spontaneous peoplehood that incurs

with it, among other things, a natural claim to an independent home-

land and likewise spells out their spontaneous (or indigenous, inherent)

sovereignty. However, Warren dismisses their views, just as Jones does in

History, stating that the Ojibway “have their beliefs and oral traditions,

but so obscure and unnatural, that nothing approximating certainty can

be drawn from them” (HOP, 55). Although this could be a way to make

his work more digestible to white audiences or a sentiment he holds

strongly, the fact remains that this bold assertion of always present, of

spontaneous peoplehood and related sovereignty, starts his discussion

of origins, framing it, if you will.

Warren then seeks to express, he tells us, his “humble opinion” about

the origin of the “Algics or Algonquin” and in particular the “Ojibway

tribe.” He engages one of the dominant theories of Native origins of

the day, arguing that they “may be descended from a portion of the lost

tribes of Israel, whom they also resemble in many important particu-

lars” (HOP, 62). It is interesting that Warren writes that this belief has

not been derived from Boudinot’s work or other scholars but that it

“has grown on me imperceptibly from my youth, ever since I could fi rst

read the Bible, and compare with it, the lodge stories and legends of my

Indian grandfathers” (HOP, 62).

To make his argument and in a manner strikingly similar to Boudi-

not, Warren lists several analogies that the Hebrews and Algics share:

a belief in one unseen Great Spirit, never using God’s name in vain, a

shared belief in the power of dreams, similar rites, fasts, and sacrifi ces,


and menstrual taboos (HOP, 63–65). He also details several traditional

Ojibway stories to show parallels between them and Bible stories (HOP,

66–75). Of most interest, in seeking out analogies between the Ojibway

and Hebrews, Warren provides us with copious information about what

the Ojibway think about their origin as well as their belief system. War-

ren’s discussion, while he claims to be proving that the Indians were the

lost tribes of Israel, also details the Ojibway’s own version of their ori-

gin, a version that directly contradicts the lost tribe theory. Transition-

ing between presenting Ojibway points of view and making a dominant

European American argument, Warren’s desire to engage dominant

discourse as well as make sure he relays the indigenous perspective of

always is apparent.

Warren makes his lost tribes argument after this theory had amal-

gamated with the Mound Builder myth and used to justify removal.

However, it is clear that he was aware of these implications, that he had

followed the dominant discourse around this issue. He proceeds to di-

rectly address the question of who built the mounds, dedicating almost

all of chapter 13 to argue that the mounds were indeed the products of

American Indians. This discussion clearly indicates that although War-

ren did view American Indians as descendents of the lost tribes of Is-

rael, he did not subscribe to the transmuted version of this theory that

helped promote the Mound Builder myth: “Having read the confl ict-

ing opinions of men who have casually passed through the county, and

seen these apparent remains of the works of a former race, my attention

was early drawn to this subject, and my inquiries among the more aged

and intelligent men of the Ojibways have been most minute, and to my

mind, satisfactorily answered” (HOP, 178). Warren concludes that rather

than the remains of a “former race,” the earthen mounds through-

out the Midwest, particularly in the upper Mississippi River area, may

“safely be considered as the remains of the earthen lodges of these for-

mer occupants (Gros Ventres) of this fair region” (HOP, 179). Warren

got this information from one of his major informants, Flat Mouth

(Esh-ke-bug-e-coshe), a chief of the Pillager Ojibway who had inter-

acted with a tribe known to “the Ojibways by the name of Gi-aucth-in-

ne-wug, signify[ing] ‘men of the olden time’ and named by the French,

Gros Ventre,” who claim to have “been former possessors of the country

from which the Mississippi takes its rise” (HOP, 178). Flat Mouth in-

forms Warren that this group, driven off by the Dakota, now occupies


the upper Missouri River and still lives in wigwams. The group is large enough to have been responsible for the construction of the mounds in the upper Mississippi region. Modern interpretations of mounds con-sider them intentional constructions, often designed for burials or other ceremonial purposes rather than just remnants of old houses.81 Warren’s argument, although not quite in line with this modern understanding, still credited American Indians with building the mounds, directly re-buking the Mound Builder myth.

Some evidence that this interpretation of Warren’s directly challenged the Mound Builder myth comes from the work of Jacob V. Brower, a European American writer focused on securing, surveying, and plotting the upper Mississippi and Missouri regions for the U.S. government. In his 1897 publication, The Missouri River and Its Utmost Source, he writes that he fi rst read Warren’s explanation of the mounds in the Minnesota Democrat. (Like much of Warren’s history, this account was fi rst pub-lished in rough form in his Minnesota Democrat series.) Brower con-cludes that “these historic suggestions indicate how very ignorant the Ojibway Indians were of the fact that a Mound Building race of men preceded them in the regions of the north.”82 Warren’s interpreta-tion clearly challenged the Mound Builder myth, and even after Cyrus Thomas had debunked it, this myth was still being widely used on the frontier to continue to push forward U.S. expansion and the develop-ment of tribal homelands. Warren’s interpretation dismissed this myth, threatening Bower and the larger project of surveying and incorporat-ing the upper Mississippi and Missouri areas.

Warren answered the questions of Native origins with a theory that, by the time he was writing, had amalgamated with a racist myth used to support removal. However, Warren explicitly separates his opinion on Native origins from this myth by explaining the Indian construction of the mounds. Warren moves easily among the dominant discourse on Native origins, delicately separating his view of the Ojibway as the lost tribes of Israel from the Mound Builder myth and the utility of these ideas for supporting removal. Warren also challenges removal logic by framing his entire discussion of Native origins through the Ojibway’s own understanding of their “fi rst existence.” He begins by telling us they were hardly “puzzled,” like European Americans, by the question of their origin, informing us that they understood themselves as always present in America, the “Spontaneous People,” a sentiment that shapes the rest

of his discussion.


concluding thoughts

Looking at these three nineteenth-century Anishinaabeg authors, Kah-

kewaquonaby (Peter Jones), Kahgegagahbowh (George Copway), and

William Whipple Warren, it is clear each was aware of the implications

different answers to the question of Native origins held within the so-

cial and political milieu of the nineteenth century. Each clearly under-

stood that questions about Native origins and their past activities were

directly intertwined with their futures. They knew that the seemingly

ceaseless land hunger, aided by removal policies aimed at completing

the territorial dispossession of Indian land, was diametrically opposed

to the needs of their communities. It was bent on having independent

indigenous lands on which the very survival of indigenous peoples de-

pended.83 All three knew that the dominant discourse of their day about

Native origins was challenging the magnitude, the duration, and even

the very legitimacy of Native Americans’ presence, connection to, and

tenure in America and that this was helping further land dispossession.

As each writer engaged with origin questions, he grappled with the

multifaceted aspects of his personal position in the world, yet each de-

veloped written answers that can be understood as acts of indigenous

resistance and persistence.84 All three delicately constructed answers

about Native origins that both appealed to their white audiences and

formed acts of “communitism.”85 They dealt adeptly as scholars with

dominant European American theories of Native origins and mound

construction, showing their audience that they were versed in this dom-

inant discourse. Both Peter Jones and William Warren endorsed domi-

nant versions of Native origins in their work, but as they did this, they

were careful to separate their views from the dire implications for land

possession involved in the Mound Builder myth. While Jones and War-

ren endorsed a dominant theory of Native origins, all three authors still

provided their audience with their communities’ own view of their ori-

gin, and this was signifi cant.

By telling their audience that Indians were made in America, or that

the Ojibway were never conquered, or that the Ojibway view of their

own “fi rst existence” is contained succinctly in their view of themselves

as “Spontaneous People,” Kahkewaquonaby (Peter Jones), Kahgegagah-

bowh (George Copway), and William Whipple Warren each provided a

counternarrative to European American speculations on Native origins


foundational to the contemporary mythology that it was Native Ameri-

cans’ destiny to vanish.86 Asserting in these ways that Native Americans

were always present, they told their audience that their communities

had a fundamental peoplehood in which sovereignty was inherent and

that this peoplehood and sovereignty had been theirs from time imme-

morial. This construct of always established a claim to the past as well as

the future, implying that these basic and abiding elements of their com-

munities should—must—remain theirs in the future. These assertions,

while sometimes subtle in the authors’ written works, still directly coun-

tered the dominant colonial dialogue forecasting Native Americans’ dis-

appearance. Establishing indigenous peoplehood as something organic,

spontaneous, permanent, these three nineteenth-century Anishinaabeg

authors challenged the dominant discourse on questions of Native ori-

gins, opening room for envisioning how truly indigenous origin stories

might be written.

Questions about where Native Americans came from, and when, did

not cease at the close of the nineteenth century, when the “West was

won” and assimilation was in full swing; rather, a torrid debate still

brews around these questions today. We need look only to the case of

the Kennewick Man, which continues to be fought in the courts, to see

just how unresolved debates on Native American origins are and to see

just what large (and sometimes very painful) gaps remain between “sci-

entifi c” and American Indian views of their origin.87

In Red Earth, White Lies Vine Deloria Jr. takes to task European

Americans interested in American Indian origins. He argues that little

progress has been made in the “scientifi c” study of Native origins, argu-

ing that the major contemporary theory for these origins, the Bering

Land Bridge Theory, is simply a redux of racist nineteenth-century ar-

guments: “The Bering strait became fi rst the ecclesiastical and then the

scientifi c trail from Jerusalem to the Americas.” He continues by argu-

ing that, beyond being a remnant of the racist politics of the nineteenth

century, the Bering Land Bridge Theory does not fi t with “scientifi c”

data, does not mesh with any American Indian oral traditions, and has

“existed only in the minds of scientists.”88 How do we reconcile these

positions and feelings with the continued and expanding quest for an-

swers about American Indian origins, a quest of great interest in science

and to the public still today?89

What may help as we move forward in building (and debating) theo-


ries of the “First Americans” is to look back, to know how this was al-ways a political issue wrought with racist overtones, and to heed this historical perspective. Understanding how nineteenth-century Ameri-can Indian authors actively and creatively engaged with the question of origins, producing statements on the matter that were balanced and dynamic acts of American Indian resistance and persistence, may of-fer models for how we can make room for multiple voices in discus-sions today. I defer to an interesting solution offered to us by Peter Jones many years ago: more indigenous people becoming actively involved in the scientifi c exploration of this question and true collaboration be-tween European and American Indian “learned men” (but I add women too). He concludes his discussion of origins with this vision, one that, although offered over 150 years ago, has gone largely unheeded and thus

still seems relevant, even urgent, for today:

If it were possible for a few of the most enlightened Indians in each nation to visit that part of Asia which lies nearest the Behring’s Straits, for the purpose of examining minutely into the language, customs, and manners of the Tartars, they would, in my opinion, discover such a similarity between the people of the two countries, as to lead to the satisfactory conclusion that the aborigines of Amer-ica are descended from the Asiatics. It would be exceedingly grati-fying to me were the fact ascertained, and I hope I may yet see the day when the attention of some of the learned and scientifi c men in Europe and America shall be turned to this subject. (HOW, 38)

notes

The idea for this article emerged years ago when I participated in the CIC-AIS

Graduate Student Seminar “Authors and Indians: Performance, Manuscript,

and Print in Nineteenth-Century Native America” at the Newberry Library in

Chicago. I want to thank Gregory Dowd for taking a chance on sending an ar-

chaeology graduate student to participate in this course on literature. Thanks

also to Phil Round, who taught this course. Here, opening the pages of War-

ren, Copway, and Jones for the fi rst time, I learned how much American Indian

authors had to teach me. I owe a major debt of gratitude to Siobhan Senier,

who has acted as a mentor since I came to the University of New Hampshire.

Siobhan pushed me to contextualize these authors within a critical framework,

never letting me get away with the excuse that as an archaeologist I couldn’t un-

derstand literature. Her guidance and the critiques of two anonymous reviewers


greatly (an understatement) improved this article. All errors and shortcomings,

of course, remain mine. The following abbreviations have been used in citing

material in the text and notes:

HOP William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway People (1885; St. Paul:

Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984)

HOW Peter Jones, History of the Ojebway Indians; with Especial Reference

to Their Conversion to Christianity (London: A. W. Bennett, 1861),

available at the Newberry Library

SF Donald Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahke-

waquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1987)

WIN Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and

the Politics of Historiography 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2004)

WWW Theresa Schenck, William W. Warren: The Life, Letters, and Times of

an Ojibwe Leader (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007)

1. See Susan A. Miller, “Native Historians Write Back: The Indigenous Para-

digm in American Indian Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 1 (2009):

25–45; Tom Holm, J. Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis, “Peoplehood: A Model for

the Extension of Sovereignty in American Indian Studies,” Wicazo Sa Review 18,

no. 1 (2003): 7–24.

2. Susan A. Miller, “Native America Writes Back: The Origin of the Indig-

enous Paradigm in Historiography,” Wicazo Sa Review 23, no. 2 (2008): 9–28, 12.

3. Miller, “Native Historians,” 32.

4. Hilary N. Weaver, “Indigenous Identity: What Is It and Who Really Has It?”

American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2001): 240–55, 245. Peoplehood has these

interwoven components that link to and extend sovereignty and identity.

5. Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, “Peoplehood,” 17; I am informed by and draw-

ing on, here and throughout this article, Craig Womack’s perspective of Na-

tive American literature as acts of resistance explored in his Red on Red: Na-

tive American Literary Separatism (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)

and Jace Weaver’s view from That the People Might Live: Native American Litera-

tures and Native American Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)

of Native American literature as “communitism” (a combination of “commu-

nity” and “activism”). All authors I explore in this article embody these prem-

ises. They have all taken a “proactive commitment to community” in their writ-

ing as well as in the whole of their lives, as they were dedicated to promoting

indigenous sovereignty.

6. Gerald Vizenor considers these men in his chapter “Three Anishinaabeg

Writers,” in The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories (Minneapo-


lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 56–74, itself a critical modern asser-

tion of tribal origins from a non-Eurocentric perspective aimed at stopping the

continued dispossession of tribal peoples. I take this term from him to refer to

these three scholars collectively. When discussing specifi c authors, I will use the

names these authors used for their own tribal groups, even in cases where these

are not the modern-day versions.

7. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary offers these six defi nitions for “spontane-

ous”: “1: proceeding from natural feeling or native tendency without external

constraint 2: arising from a momentary impulse 3: controlled and directed in-

ternally: self-acting 4: produced without being planted or without human la-

bor: indigenous 5: developing or occurring without apparent external infl uence,

force, cause, or treatment 6: not apparently contrived or manipulated: natural.

See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spontaneous.

8. As Benedict Anderson discusses in Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (1983;

London: Verso, 2006), 6, a nation is an imagined political community, yet this does

not mean imagining that a nation is a falsity; it is creation, an active process.

9. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 191–93, for an interesting analysis of

how, while seen as a radical break from the past, the American Revolution was

not nearly the high-stakes game it is often portrayed as because it was a revolu-

tion of creoles who, ultimately, were white kinsmen.

10. Phillip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

1998), 63. See the fi rst three chapters of this eloquent work for details on the

complex ways American Indians and “playing Indian” were used, counterposed,

and interposed throughout the building of the early republic.

11. See Deloria, Playing Indian, chaps. 1–3; as well as Steve Conn, History’s

Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) for more detailed discussions.

12. See Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis

and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1995); and Anthony Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate

of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) for de-

tails on American Indians in postrevolutionary America.

13. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36.

14. See Miller, “Native Historians”; and Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, “People-

hood.”

15. David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology and the

Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000), chap. 3.

16. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Merrill D. Peterson

(1781–82; New York, 1984). Electronic version accessed at the Electronic Text

Center, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/

public/JefVirg.html, 226, 227.


17. See Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London: Gregory

Dexter, 1643).

18. James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London: Edward and

Charles Dilly, 1775), available at the Newberry Library.

19. Elias Boudinot, the founder and editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, took his

name from this Elias Boudinot because he paid for his education. Cherokee

Boudinot was born Gallegina Watie. While one imagines Boudinot was familiar

with white Boudinot’s theories on the origins of Native Americans, in preparing

this essay I read Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot, ed. Theda Pur-

due (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983) and found no reference to the

specifi c question of American Indian origins or the lost tribes of Israel theory in

his writings compiled there.

20. Elias Boudinot, A Star in the West: or A Humble Attempt to Discover the

Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, preparatory to their return to their beloved city,

Jerusalem (Trenton, NJ: D. Fenton, S. Hutchinson and J. Dunham, 1816), 279,

available at the Newberry Library.

21. Boudinot, A Star in the West, 88.

22. Review of Boudinot’s A Star in the West (Baltimore: Neale, Wills and Cole,

1816–18), Portico: A Repository of Science and Literature. I found this contempo-

rary review of Boudinot in loose papers that came with other information on

Boudinot at the Newberry Library.

23. Conn, History’s Shadow; Thomas, Skull Wars; and Barbara A. Mann, Na-

tive Americans, Archaeologists, and the Mounds (Washington, DC: Peter Lang,

2003) offer details on the rise in popularity of this theory in the nineteenth

century.

24. Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews (Poultney, VT: Smith and Shute, 1823),

133.

25. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 226.

26. Donald Blaksee, “John Rowzee Peyton and the Myth of the Mound Build-

ers,” American Antiquity 52, no. 4 (1987): 784–92, 789.

27. Clark R. Mallam, “Mound Builders: An American Myth,” Journal of the

Iowa Archaeological Society 23 (1976): 145–75.

28. Randall McGuire, “Why Have Archaeologists Thought the Real Indians

Were Dead and What Can We Do about It?” in Indians and Anthropologists: Vine

Deloria Jr. and the Critique of Anthropology, ed. Thomas Biolsi and Larry Zim-

merman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 63–91, 69.

29. Mann, Native Americans, 68.

30. Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of

Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi (1830; Salt Lake City, UT:

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1986).

31. Mann, Native Americans, 154, 71. While many have suggested that Joseph


Smith’s Book of Mormon was greatly infl uenced by Ethan Smith’s View of the

Hebrews (which was greatly infl uenced by Boudinot’s A Star in the West), Joseph

Smith clearly developed the connection with the Mound Builder myth sepa-

rately from Ethan Smith, who never made these same assertions. As Mallam

suggests, “Joseph Smith was heavily infl uenced by a combination of romanti-

cism and the vanishing race theory” (“Mound Builders,” 154).

32. Mann, Native Americans, 71.

33. Thomas, Skull Wars, 128.

34. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies,” in Poems (New York: Harper and

Brothers, 1836).

35. Cyrus Thomas, “Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of

Ethnology,” in Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary

of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890–91 (1894), 3–730.

36. To see the continued popularity of these ideas in cult circles, explore the

journal Ancient American, http://www.ancientamerican.com/.

37. See Thomas, Skull Wars; McGuire, “Why Have Archaeologists Thought”;

Mann, Native Americans; and Robert Silverberg, Mound Builders of Ancient

America (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968) for more details on the

Mound Builder myth and Manifest Destiny.

38. Andrew Jackson, “Case for the Removal Act, First Annual Message to Con-

gress, December 8, 1830,” http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/andrew.htm

emphasis added.

39. See Miller, “Native Historians”; and Holm, Pearson, and Chavis, “People-

hood.”

40. Silverberg, Mound Builders, 58.

41. Although I am currently focusing on this specifi c group of authors, I ex-

plored the work of other American Indian authors to understand more broadly

the ways Native intellectuals were engaging origin discourse throughout the

nineteenth century and the synergy between them. During this process I was

struck by how many American Indian scholars engaged the issue of origins in

their work, even if they just gave it the slightest mention. As mentioned above,

I did not fi nd Elias Boudinot engaging the dominant origin theories, but he

does make an assertion of Native origination of the mounds. In 1825 he wrote:

“Their bones now moulder beneath some lonely shed and the scant earth which

covers them is all they can claim; and perhaps even that is cleft in twain by the

plough that procures you nourishment. Their possessions once were great—a

boundless country, supplying them with game—and the multitude of watery

elements were theirs. You now live on their ruins! Can you still harbor revenge?”

(Cherokee Editor, 47). Other American Indian authors I examined in preparing

this essay who engaged with the dominant discourse on origins were Andrew J.

Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan (Ypsilanti,


MI: Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 1887); Joseph Nicolar, The Life and Tradi-

tions of the Red Man, ed. Annette Kolodny (1893; Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2007); William Apess, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apess,

a Native of the Forest, in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William

Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (1831; Amherst: University of Massachu-

setts Press, 1992), 1–98; Peter Dooyentate Clarke, Origin and Traditional History

of the Wyandotts, and Sketches of Other Indian Tribes of North America (To-

ronto: Hunter, Rose, 1870), available at the Newberry Library; Simon Pokagon,

“O-GI-MAW-KWE-MIT-I-GWA-KI” Queen of the Woods (Hartford, MI: C. H.

Engle, 1899), available at the Newberry Library; and “Pottawatamie Book of

Genesis: legend of the creation of man,” birch-bark document, 1890s, Newberry

Library. I offer this list to show the potential for exploring this subject more.

42. Sidner Larson, “Following Multiple Perspectivism in James Welch’s ‘Win-

ter in the Blood’ and ‘The Death of Jim Loney,’” American Indian Quarterly 31,

no. 4 (2007): 513–34, 513.

43. Scott Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins

of American Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),

122. Although Michaelsen recognizes that the goal of Jones’s and Copway’s auto-

ethnography and metahistories was to achieve this undercutting, he questions

if they could ever be successful, challenging whether “the establishment of Indi-

anness in any manner, according to whatever history and anthropology, can free

itself from the dominations inherent in identity formation.”

44. Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American

Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 30.

45. Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 30. See Weaver’s analysis of this posi-

tion (That the People Might Live, 22–25).

46. Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 36.

47. Womack, Red on Red, chap. 4.

48. As Siobhan Senier says of American Indian authors writing in the Era of

Assimilation, “A group of visible and articulate indigenous people who advo-

cated assimilation—those, like Posey and LaFlesche, dubbed Red Progressives—

were responsible for a good many of the Native-authored texts we now read

from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This group of writers

left an intellectual history that is, in the words of Robert Allen Warrior, ‘skewed

. . . in favor of the integrationist position.’ Tending to suppress dissent, Warrior

notes, these people did not give full voice to treaty-based, nationalist discourses

that hold fi rmly to ideals of self-determination and cultural autonomy” (“Al-

lotment Protest and Tribal Discourse: Reading Wynema’s Successes and Short-

comings,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 [2000]: 420–40, 425).

49. Senier, “Allotment Protest,” 425. Indeed, we know the spoken word was

critical to American Indian identity and resistance throughout the nineteenth


century, often in contrast to European Americans’ command of the written

one: “Despite Euroamericans’ skill with printed texts to secure their interests,

the Haudenosaunee used the spoken word and the rituals of treaty negotia-

tions very effectively in their relations with the European colonists” (Granville

Ganter, “Red Jacket and the Decolonization of Republican Virtue,” American In-

dian Quarterly 31, no. 4 [2007]: 559–81, 560).

50. Weaver, That the People Might Live, 44–45; see Womack, Red on Red; Rob-

ert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Tradi-

tions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Siobhan Senier, Voices

of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Win-

nemucca, and Victoria Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003);

Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

51. Womack, Red on Red, 31.

52. Brooks, The Common Pot, xxvii–xxviii.

53. Weaver, That the People Might Live, 45.

54. As Krupat argues, “Indian autobiography was important for keeping man

inseparable from his Indianness in the era of kill the Indian and save the man;

this idea can be extended to Indian author’s engagement with origin ques-

tions—this was essential for working against the socially dominant ideology

that Indians’ origins were recent and/or violent both of which made them il-

legitimate holders of their land” (For Those Who Come After, 74).

55. Weaver, That the People Might Live, 45; Holm, Pearson, and Chavis,

“Peoplehood.”

56. Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American

Indian Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 131.


58. Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and

Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 263.

59. Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism, 108.

60. Apess, A Son of the Forest, 52–98.

61. Hilary N. Weaver, “Indigenous Identity: What Is It and Who Really Has

It?” American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2001): 240–55, 245. Peoplehood has

these interwoven components that link to and extend sovereignty and identity.

62. Miller, “Native Historians,” 32.

63. See Donald Smith, “Kahgegagahbowh: Canada’s First Literary Celebrity

in the United States,” in Life, Letters and Speeches, ed. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff

and Donald B. Smith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 23–60, for

details on Copway’s life history.

64. George Copway, The Life, Letters and Speeches of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, or G.

Copway, Chief Ojibway Nation, in Ruoff and Smith, Life, Letters and Speeches, 113.


65. Smith, “Kahgegagahbowh.”

66. George Copway, The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the

Ojibway Nation (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850), 19 (reprinted by Kessinger Pub-

lishing in 2001).

67. Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism, 108.

68. Copway, Traditional History, 59–67.

69. Copway, The Life, Letters, and Speeches, 142.


71. Copway, Traditional History, 281.

72. Smith, “Kahgegagahbowh,” 36–37.

73. A. LaVonne Ruoff, “Copway, George,” in The Heath Anthology of American

Literature, 4th ed., ed. Paul Lauter (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 2001).

74. Copway, The Life, Letters, and Speeches, 89–90.


76. Copway, Traditional History, chap. 2, “Their origin, or course of migra-

tion according to their traditions”; chap. 9, “Their legendary stories and histori-

cal tales”; chap. 12, “Their religious belief.”


78. Copway, Traditional History, 59–67.

79. This to me seems to share tones with Doty’s and Copway’s plans for a

united Indian state in the upper Mississippi region.

80. Warren indeed embodied what Weaver sets out in That the People Might

Live as critical for being an American Indian author, that is, “communitism.”

81. A very nice treatment of mounds as American Indian sacred structures

is Jane Buikstra and Douglas Charles, “Centering the Ancestors: Cemeteries,

Mounds, and Sacred Landscapes of the Ancient North American Midconti-

nent,” in Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Wendy A.

Ashmore and A. Bernard Knapp (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 201–28.

82. Jacob V. Brower, The Missouri River and Its Utmost Source (St. Paul: Pio-

neer Press, 1897), 156.

83. Miller, “Native America,” 12.

84. Again, I am informed here by Craig Womack’s perspective of Native

American literature as acts of resistance explored in Red on Red.

85. Again, I am drawing on Weaver’s concept detailed in That the People

Might Live.


87. For a very thoughtful and detailed assessment of the Kennewick case, see

Thomas, Skull Wars.

88. Vine Deloria Jr., Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of

Scientifi c Fact (New York: Scribner, 1995), 6.

89. Exemplifying the popularity of interest in this subject, consider the March


13, 2006, issue of Time magazine where Kennewick Man graced the front cover,

with the title “The Untold Saga of Early Man in America” and the long article

“Who Were the First Americans?”; Thomas Dillehay’s popular The Settlement

of the Americas: A New Prehistory (New York: Basic Books, 2001); or, very re-

cently, hype over the 14,300-year-old fi nds from Paisley Cave, Oregon, in April

2008 (with the news of this fi nd running in outlets across America). Also gain-

ing popularity are genetic approaches to the question of “First Americans” that

combine mtDNA evidence from ancient skeletal materials and living American

Indian populations to locate their geographic origin and date their entrance to

the New World. See Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost His-

tory of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin, 2007) or do a simple Google search

of “First Americans DNA” to fi nd thousands upon thousands of news articles

about recent discoveries on this topic.

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