We seem to be driving in circles. Patches of sunlight on the gravel road betray no evidence of the direction of travel through this dense, lush forest. It looks a bit like a coastal Oregon landscape; the light tinged a watery green as it passes through the thick canopy of tall pines. These tribal access roads do not appear in our atlas, so there’s nothing to be done but continue driving through the disorientation. We rumble past acres where two out of every three trees have been cut, a few stately, old trees spared along with the saplings that will re-populate the stand and enable it to blend back in to the seemingly untouched forest that dominates the landscape. This land is the Menominee Nation, and it has been actively managed using traditional forestry practices for the last 175 years. It feels as remote and ancient as the virgin forest of our imagination, yet, as tribal foresters are quick to point out, it’s been logged twice over and more than 2 billion board feet of timber has been shipped south to build cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. Nevertheless, it remains one of the healthiest forests in the world, the color and density of its vegetation so distinct from the surrounding landscape that the reservation’s borders are visible from space and used to georeference satellite imagery. Despite the prodigious harvest there is more standing timber today than when the Menominee Reservation was created in 1854. For this reason, forestry programs from around the world send their best students to study here. Eventually, the gravel road runs into blacktop. We turn left and find ourselves back on the map, headed toward the lumber mill in Neopit.
As distant and isolated as Menominee Nation feels from the urban centers whose economies and histories typically define the Midwest, its relationship to cities like Chicago is more complex than its role as a supplier of natural resources might suggest. The Menominee forest is part of a network, not just or even mostly in relation with the Midwest’s major cities, but also with the always-unfolding story of Native life in this region. In many ways, the story of Chicago, or any settler city, is but a blip in the 10,000-year history of the Menominee in Wisconsin and, like any sovereign tribal nation, Menominee is absolutely central to itself. William Cronon’s epic text Nature’s Metropolis is largely a spatial story about the entangled histories of Chicago and its surroundings that speaks to the futility of trying to separate country from city in our minds. Centering the Menominee Nation, instead of Chicago, produces a very different kind of story. Both are important and have much to offer one another. Yet the familiar tale in which Chicago is the main protagonist has effectively drowned out the other stories in which it plays more of a supporting role. Inverting the center/periphery frame that has imbued these stories with uneven value creates space to imagine and prefigure alternatives. Much as the Menominee Nation's majestic white pines built the existing Chicago, so too might the resurgence of the Native Midwest inform our struggle to create a more just and sustainable future.
"Native Resurgence" is a guide or primer to sites of Native American resistance and ingenuity in the upper Midwest since the 1970s. Our goals are threefold. First, we want to place Native stories firmly in the center of our narrative; they too often occupy a position peripheral to the concerns of urban progressives and radicals. Second, we want to highlight successful examples of recent Native activism and tribal development, since stories of all-too-real victimization and discrimination tend to be the ones that most readily spring to the minds of politically conscious non-Natives. Finally, we hope that focusing on Midwestern Native politics might productively unsettle familiar narratives of Chicago's urban processes, placing them in relation to a longer history of colonialism and dispossession, but also endurance and evolution.
From longstanding organizations such as the American Indian Center of Chicago—the nation’s oldest urban Indian center—to fleeting events such as the American Indian Chicago Conference of 1961 and the occupations at Chicago Indian Village, Belmont Harbor and Argonne National Laboratories in the early 1970s, Chicago itself has a rich history of Native survivance--the joint processes of survival and resistance. The implications of this history—what it enables us to do in a historical present haunted by racism and colonialism—become more clear when Chicago is de-centered from its position as the de facto capital of the Midwest and re-situated in a larger regional context. Not only will this dissolve the false dichotomy between urban and rural but, for our purposes, it allows us to begin seeing this land—from the Calumet River to Lac du Flambeau—for what it is: Indian Country.
Top image: "Chief St. Germain," tourist information center, St. Germain, WI, July 2009
Bottom image: Mohican Nation welcome sign, Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation, July 2009