| Popis: |
The Indian removal policy of the Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations made the years between 1829 and 1841 particularly difficult for the nearly three thousand Ottawa of Michigan.1 Directly involved in the frontier process, with its resulting competition for the land and resources they had exploited for centuries, tensions between the Ottawa and the intrusive Americans sometimes resulted in violence, alcoholism, and population reduction through smallpox and other infectious diseases. Yet, to characterize the Ottawa as passive victims of racially prejudiced land hungry settlers, unscrupulous profit mad traders, or domineering government policy makers obscures the active and successful role they created to meet the challenges they faced between 1836 and 1855, the years when they were being incorporated into a broader American political and economic system. This paper, then, examines how the Ottawa of Michigan successfully used the natural and human resources at their disposal to avoid removal to Kansas or Minnesota between 1836 and 1855. |
