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Abstract: Borderlands studies have expanded how scholars understand interactions between Euro-Americans and Indigenous nations. However, borderlands did not only exist where Euro-Americans were present. "Relations Across the Lands" argues that Indigenous borderlands existed between tribes and that these Indigenous borderlands functioned differently from borderlands between empires and Native nations. Relationships rested at the center of boundaries, identity, and who could access vital environmental gifts. This article demonstrates the presence of these Indigenous borderlands by examining a case study of the westward movement of the Ojibwe during the eighteenth century and their resulting interactions with the Dakota. The framework of Indigenous borderlands can help decolonize historical narratives and illuminate understudied aspects of Indigenous lifeways further centering Indigenous narratives.
Keywords: Great Lakes, Indigenous, borderlands, Ojibwe, Dakota, relationship, environmental resources
In 1797 spring arrived in the western Great Lakes with chilly nights, but warmer, longer, and sunnier days. This season renewed the annual maple sugar harvest, a tradition that continues to this day. Anishinaabeg matriarchs doled out assignments and performed the necessary rituals of thanksgiving for the sacred, sugary waters of the trees in sugar bushes from Lake Huron to the western edge of Lake Superior.1 By the 1790s some of the westernmost Anishinaabeg communities were Ojibwe families who tapped trees along the shores of Sandy Lake.2 These Ojibwe families moved throughout the trees cutting into the bark and hammering in taps that allowed sap to drip and collect in birch bark containers. Through a process of continuous boiling, the water of the sap evaporated leaving a golden sugar that could be stored for months. The flowing of the sap signaled that warmer weather was on its way providing families relief that they once again survived another winter.
The trees surrounding Sandy Lake in 1797 were rooted in a changing landscape more than a century in the making. British fur trader David Thompson recorded that while the Ojibwe focused on gathering the sap, Dakota warriors, whose communities continued to maintain claims to the space as part of their homelands, surrounded, attacked, and killed 67 Ojibwe men, women, and children.3 Historians and anthropologists have explained the Dakota actions as a defensive stance taken in retaliation against Ojibwe hunters who expanded their territory too far onto Dakota lands.4 While...