City of Dispossessions

Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit

Kyle T. Mays

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780812298543
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In July 2013, Detroit became the largest city in U.S. history to declare bankruptcy. The underlying causes were decades of deindustrialization, white flight, and financial mismanagement. More recently it has been heralded a comeback city as wealthy white residents resettle there. Yet, as Kyle T. Mays argues, we cannot understand the current state of Detroit without also understanding the longer history of Native American and African American dispossession that has defined the city since its founding.How has dispossession impacted the development of modern U.S. cities? And how does comparing the historical experiences of Native Americans and African Americans in an urban context help us comprehend histories of race, sovereignty, and colonialism? Using archives, oral and family histories, and community documents, City of Dispossessions is a cultural, intellectual, and social history that argues that physical and symbolic forms of dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans, and their reactions to dispossession, have been central to Detroit's modern development.The book begins with the first settlement by the Frenchman Cadillac in 1701 and chronicles how the logic of dispossession has continued into the present, through a wide range of forms that include memorialization of the "disappearing Indian, " the physical dispossession of African Americans through urban renewal, and gentrification. Mays also chronicles the wide-ranging forms of expression through which Black and Indigenous Detroiters have contested dispossession, such as the Red and Black Power movements and culturally relevant education.Through lively, accessible prose as well as historical and contemporary examples, City of Dispossessions will be of interest to readers of urban studies, Indigenous Studies, and critical ethnic studies.

Chapter 1

The Roots of Dispossession: From Waawayeyaattanong to Detroit

A history of dispossession in Detroit must begin with European settlers’ occupation and forced removal of Native people in the eighteenth century. This is the original dispossession—the most familiar one—but not the only one. Even before this moment of encounter, we must account for the people who were already in the Great Lakes area. According to Anishinaabeg oral histories, the Anishinaabe migrated from the eastern part of the United States. Gitchi-Manidoo (the Great Spirit) prophesied that they would make seven sacred stops, and they would find food growing on water (which is manoomin, or wild rice).

Moving along the St. Lawrence River, they stopped at present-day sites of Montreal; Niagara Falls; Manitoulin Island; Sault Ste. Marie; Duluth, Minnesota; and Madeline Island. The third sacred stop is present-day Detroit, which also includes the many islands in the Detroit River. Detroit was one of a few central meeting places for Indigenous people to negotiate and settle disputes.

Detroit is a French word that translates to “the straits.” Anishinaabeg had their own name for the space: “wawaiiatan,” which translates to “round” or “circular.”1 Other Indigenous names referenced the geographic nature of the space.2 Beginning with the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac’s landing in July 1701, wawaiiatanong would change from an Anishinaabe space, including its name, to an occupied, European space. The French occupation changed the area from a meeting place to a site of dispossession. The Anishinaabeg attempted to maintain their way of life and find ways to deal peacefully with the French and British and the competition for land, furs, and supremacy.

Even before the French arrived, they were entering an already fragmented Indigenous world. Disease had killed thousands of Indigenous people. Multiple Indigenous nations were embroiled in warfare. The Haudenosaunee had attacked many Algonquian-speaking peoples throughout the Great Lakes region. The Haudenosaunee wanted beaver and replacements for their people lost to battle. Disease and conflicts created refugees throughout the Great Lakes area. Historian Helen Hornbeck Tanner notes that, prior to Fort Detroit’s founding, “no tribal group was settled in the region south of Detroit on the western and southern shores of Lake Erie.” Detroit was on the “fringe of an apparently vacant area.”3 The French, wanting in on the fur trade, were able to walk into Detroit and occupy the land.4

Cadillac, along with dozens of men, came to Detroit in July 1701. They chose that location because of its close proximity to the Detroit River. As a political choice, the French also chose it to ward off advancing Haudenosaunee and British aggression during the fur trade; in addition, it served as a site of negotiation and peace, as well as a fur-trading post. However, Cadillac quickly realized that he needed Indigenous allies in order to thrive.

Between 1701 and 1703, Cadillac beckoned different Indigenous bands, including Wyandot and Michilimackinac, who would join the already present Tionontati, a tribal group that spoke Huron, to come live near the fort. A few years later, other Indigenous bands would join, including the Odawa from Mackinac and two Anishinaabe bands, the Saulteur and the Mississaugi. Finally, a group of Potawatomi and Miami came from the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. This collection of Indigenous groups would then provide protection from hostile Haudenosaunee and British, food for military personnel, and furs for traders. By 1705, there were about 2,000 Indigenous people living in the area, including 400 warriors. By 1712, only four tribal communities remained in the area: the Anishinaabe, the Odawa, the Potawatomi, and the Huron. The Mississaugi moved to the Thames River in Canada; other Anishinaabe moved to Lake St. Clair and would eventually become known as the “Chippewa of Saginaw Bay.”5

Detroit continued as a place of cultural exchange and violence throughout the eighteenth century. It was a part of what historian Richard White called “the pays d’en haut.” Although scholars have challenged, developed, and deemed White’s definition of the “middle ground” incomplete, it is still useful.6 It was a space in which “the older worlds of the Algonquians and various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and exchange.”7 These encounters and relationships were filled with fear, cultural and political misunderstandings, miscommunications, and violence. In this middle ground occurred “the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien, as exotic, as other.”8

Detroit and violent conflict were synonymous for almost two centuries. It is perhaps known best for Pontiac’s so-called conspiracy. In the spring of 1763, led by the Odawa war chief Pontiac, hundreds of warriors attempted to retake British forts throughout the Great Lakes region, including Detroit. Pontiac and Indigenous people were able to retake some forts, but at Detroit the conflict ended in a stalemate. Pontiac then left the area and moved to present-day Illinois, where he was eventually murdered. Detroit continued to be a place of importance well into the nineteenth century. Pontiac’s rebellion occurred there, as did the War of 1812. Indigenous people were more than a sideshow to those important histories of U.S. expansion and Indigenous dispossession.

As the United States expanded following the Revolutionary War, it sought more land. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, oversaw large portions of U.S. land expropriation. Following the Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson acquired for the United States from the French in 1803, Jefferson also desired control over more land, including Detroit. Detroit was important because of its close proximity to the British occupation of what is now Canada.

In the context of Detroit, one of the first treaties signed was the Treaty of Detroit in 1807.9 On November 17, 1807, William Hull, who was appointed by Jefferson to be the governor of Michigan territory, negotiated the treaty between the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot tribal nations and the United States, which ceded lands in present-day southeast Michigan and Northwest Ohio to the United States. This treaty would later cause problems with Shawnees and Tecumseh, who waged an epic struggle to form an Indigenous state in Ohio, and it contributed to the War of 1812.10 Article 2 of the treaty states that the United States, with the consent of the Senate, would pay $3,333.33 and four mills to the Odawa and Ojibwe nations and $1,666.06 and six mills to the Wyandot and Potawatomi nations. This treaty and others, in addition to African enslavement, were early examples of racial capitalism in the United States.11 Just as African enslavement was essential to the development of the U.S. political economy, so too were treaties with Indigenous nations. The U.S. government was able to not only acquire land but also engage in land speculation for the purpose of profit. This profit in turn helped fund the U.S. government.12 For the United States, negotiating the dispossession of Indigenous land and using Detroit as the meeting place for this exchange largely benefited the white settler capitalists. Of course, treaties do not fully negate Indigenous agency and the attempts by Indigenous people to negotiate a livelihood as best they can; however, the history of the United States is rooted also in land dispossession. Other treaties included an 1855 agreement between Anishinaabeg and Odawa bands and the United States, which led to further dispossession, and the modern reservations that now exist in Michigan.

Detroit was also a place rooted in both enslavement and dispossession. It was a borderland bound between the reality of slavery and the possibilities of freedom. Slavery was a common feature in early Detroit, and the majority of the enslaved were Indigenous. Historian Tiya Miles’s The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits captures the complexity of the city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Miles notes, “In the mercantile settlement that would eventually become an American urban behemoth, hundreds of people,” including Blacks and Indigenous people, were “kept captive, stripped of autonomy, and forced to labor for others.”13 Indigenous removal and African enslavement built Detroit.14 In 1750, 25 percent of French families enslaved Indigenous people, and that enslaved group made up 7 percent of the population.15 The enslavement of Indigenous peoples was not the same as some might imagine about southern slavery. Many enslaved Indigenous people worked in the fur trade and as domestics.

One of the most important parts of legislation connected to the history of Michigan, dispossession, and enslavement was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. After the British had surrendered the Ohio Country following the Revolutionary War, it remained a place in limbo. U.S. settlers began to move into the Ohio Country, causing rifts with Indigenous peoples. At the legislative level, it set the stage for U.S. expansion, statehood, and the meanings of citizenship. One could only become a citizen after living there for three years and holding 200 acres of land. Although the Northwest Ordinance maintained that Native “lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent” and that “there shall be neither slavery or involuntary servitude in said territory,” it did not halt Indigenous dispossession, nor did it include people of African descent as citizens. The ordinance effectively determined that citizens would be property-owning white settler men; it solidified who could be a citizen and who could not.

This set the stage for further forms of Black and Indigenous dispossession in Michigan throughout the nineteenth century. For example, one of the Michigan Territory laws enacted in 1827 was designed to halt Black settlement in the territory; it required Black migrants to show valid papers demonstrating their freedom or proof of birth before the state would allow them to settle in Michigan.16 Michigan Territory created dispossession laws before Black migrants could even settle.

Black people, although dispossessed, also found ways to resist. For example, there was the case of Thornton and Ruth Blackburn. In July 1831, the Blackburns escaped from Louisville, Kentucky. They arrived in Detroit shortly after and made it their home. Two years later, their enslavers discovered that they were in Detroit. In June 1833, they were apprehended under slave codes that would require fugitives to be returned to their enslavers. On June 15, the court found them guilty, placed them in jail, and planned to ship them back to Louisville. Mrs. Tabitha Lightfoot, the wife of Madison Lightfoot, who co-founded the Detroit Anti-Slavery Society, and Mrs. Caroline French, two prominent members of Detroit’s Black community, visited Mrs. Blackburn in jail. During the visit, Mrs. French switched clothing with Mrs. Blackburn. Disguised as Mrs. French, Blackburn walked out of the jail with Mrs. Lightfoot. They immediately helped get her over to Canada. Mr. Blackburn was still imprisoned, but a group of Black men ripped him away from his captors and immediately sent him across the Detroit River to be with his wife. This was a triumphant, albeit short-lived, victory with devastating consequences. A combination of citizens, police, and the military patrolled the streets with guns, knives, and swords, jailing any Black person they saw and attacking and terrorizing them. Whites violently attacked and burned Black businesses, forcing prominent Black families to flee their properties or sell them, many going across the Detroit River into Ontario, Canada.17 After the riot, whites treated Blacks worse than before. They would not employ them. Black people had to post a $500 bond in order to show that they would obey the law; if they could not pay, they would be forced to leave.18

Dispossession in the form of second-class citizenship was a fundamental part of the Black experience after the so-called Blackburn riots. The 1835 Michigan Constitution stated that voters would include “every white male citizen above the age of twenty-one years” who had “lived in the state for six months before an election.”19 Being a voter was a fundamental basis of U.S. citizenship. The African American population would not increase again until after statehood.

Detroit was the capitol of Michigan from 1807 through 1847, during which time major changes swept over the Midwest.20 Perhaps the most significant event that changed the landscape of cities like Detroit was the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which facilitated an increase in the number of white settlers because they now had an easy way to access Michigan Territory. In addition to waterways being opened and transformed, so too was the land. Roads were improved, all of which made transportation of goods, people, and resources from the east much easier. Detroit’s population grew from 2,222 in 1830 to 9,102 by 1840.

In the 1850s, Detroit was caught between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, a place of enslavement for Black and Indigenous people, and a locus of freedom through the Underground Railroad. For example, before infamous white radical abolitionist John Brown and a dozen or so formerly enslaved Africans unsuccessfully tried to take over Harpers Ferry in October 1859, he made two stops in Detroit. The first was in 1858, when he met with members of the Colored Vigilant Committee, which consisted of notable members of the Black elite, such as William Lambert, William Monroe, and George DeBaptiste. A year later, he would return and try to convince these folks to help raid Harpers Ferry.21 Although DeBaptiste objected to Brown’s plan, he offered a more radical idea of using gunpowder to blow up fifteen of the largest churches in the South.22

At the same time, on the eve of a civil war, in the fight to end African enslavement, Indigenous people were thought to be disappearing, including from Detroit. On April 29, 1853, the Detroit Daily Free Press published an article that mentioned the quickly vanishing Detroit Indigenous community. “We noticed four aborigines yesterday, on seeing whom we could not but reflect on the great changes that have taken place in our city in fifteen years.” Reflecting on the situation only fifteen years previously, the article remarked, “In 1838, a person by merely glancing through almost any street, could see parties of these children of the forest scattered throughout its entire length.” Detroit’s citizens could hear Indigenous people right across the way in the nearby forests, apparently keeping up those who stayed at a local hotel: “Horrible were the grimaces, and discordant yells, of the dusky-featured performers, as they hopped and writhed with the utmost agility, destitute, as they were of nearly every article of clothing. Now, it is comparatively rarely that one of them is to be seen. They are almost gone, and in a short time, their former existence among us will be known only through the medium of tradition. Farewell, ‘Injuns,’ ‘Niitchees,’ a long farewell!”23 This long farewell was more than just hyperbole; it was an attempt to erase Indigenous people from the public imagination.

From newspapers to books such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), whites throughout the United States believed that Native people were going to disappear. These narratives not only continued the long-held idea of Indigenous savagery and disappearance from the land but also cemented the vanishing Indian trope. Settlers spread these stories...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. Dispossession, Detroit!
• 1. The Roots of Dispossession: From Waawayeyaattanong to Detroit
• 2. Performing Dispossession: Detroit’s 1901 Bicentenary
• 3. Reclaiming Detroit: Blackness and Indigeneity During the Age of Fordism
• 4. Citizenship and Sovereignty: Black Nationalism and Indigenous Self-Determination
• 5. Black Indigeneity and Urban Indigenous Feminism in Postwar Detroit
• 6. Dispossession and the Roots of Culturally Relevant Education
• Conclusion. “Where Have All the Indians Gone?”: The Afterlife of Dispossession, Detroit
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments