Hungry Spirits: Anishinaabe resistance and revitalization

Abstract

Tribal members of the White Earth Band of Anishinaabe-Ojibway have struggled for generations to maintain their collective rights to Turtle Island, their vast homelands and territories stretching throughout North America, especially through the Upper Great Lakes region where they have lived and traveled for more than 10,000 years as America's first residents and First Nations (Quimby 1960; Wright 1972; Usher et al 1985; Tanner, ed. 1987; Morton and Gawboy 2000). The focus of this dissertation is the struggle of the White Earth Anishinaabe to recover land (LaDuke 2005; Silverstone 1987; Lurie, J. 2003) and protect subsistence rights to hunt and fish in northern Minnesota (Lone Fight 1994). It also represents an ethnography of resistance and revitalization in the face of land loss (Gibson 1978; Lurie, N. 1978) and market debasement (Swenson, ed. 1982; Spry 1983; Shkilnyk 1985) in an increasingly globalized world (Davis, S. 1982, 1991; Davis, W. 1993; Hornborg 1994; Abrahamson 1998; Piot 1999). In 1986 twelve U.S. Congressmen voted in Washington DC to end all land claims held by the White Earth Band (Shipp 1987). However, the Band has never relinquished rights to fish and hunt throughout their territories ceded by treaties of 1837 and later in 1855. Today 93 percent of the reservation's 837,000 acres is controlled by non-Indians: two-thirds held by European American immigrant farmers and individuals who own lake cabins, resorts, or hunting grounds; the U.S. federal government including U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; State of Minnesota; Becker, Mahnomen, and Clearwater counties (tax forfeiture lands); religious organizations and major corporations. The anthropological research problem is this: how does one analyze and compare relationships between community and market economies (Lofving, ed. 2005; Gudeman 2008)? In their struggle to recover their land base and revitalize their community's economy and well-being, tribal members want to show that a standing forest, one that provides food stuffs (animals and plants), material needs, and medicines, for local community members, has more value than a clearcut forest (Woehrle 1996).