‘A swing of the pendulum, maybe’: Ojibwe self-representation, settler intolerance, and the collaborative state

Abstract

This article considers the cultural politics of settlement in the contemporary USA through an analysis of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe's efforts to couple struggles for treaty rights with projects in self-representation. Resisting a logic of elimination, the band presents itself as a vital force, neither vanished nor vanquished. The band's Chief Executive denounces the State of Minnesota's intolerance, revealing a settler culture organised around sport and opposed to an Ojibwe ethics. At the same time, the state participates in Ojibwe assertion. At the Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post State Historic Site, the Minnesota Historical Society works with the band to interpret the band's history and culture from its members' points of view and in keeping with their priorities. Working against mistaken expectations, Ojibwe museum guides demonstrate indigenous endurance, ingenuity, and settlement. These episodes herald a larger effort to politicise tolerance and shift the burden of history away from Ojibwe people and onto non-Natives. I examine ways the state begins to unsettle itself and its citizens through collaboration in indigenous projects. I attend also to an Ojibwe sense that something – but not everything – has changed.