Learn about the history of settlement in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan and the Native Americans who live here today.
Episode 34: Native Americans and the Settlement of West Michigan
Transcript.
Penny: In this episode, we join Professor Kuilema again as he outlines the history of the indigenous peoples around Grand Rapids in West Michigan. We learn about the key players in the settlement of the Grand Rapids area, the forced removal of native peoples to the West, and the settler reshaping of the landscape and the land.
Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project, supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Joe: My name is Joe Kuilema. I teach in Sociology and Social Work. What I'm going to try to do today is put some context around why we're here in this particular place. Why Calvin exists here. Why people are here at all.
We're going to start way back because Grand Rapids starts way back. The first documentation that we have of people living in this area is from around the time of Christ. So, the turn of the century… of the millennia. Right? The year zero. These people, we don't know a lot about. They’re widely called the mound builders or the Hopewell culture. There is widespread disagreement about whether these people are direct ancestors of native peoples, as many Native Americans claim, or whether they were a separate and distinct group as many white people claim. Indeed, some of the colonial founders of Grand Rapids claimed that this was an ancient and superior race, and that the Native Americans had lost any of their ability to reproduce great works or art or culture. They called Native Americans a third race that came after these people. If you've ever looked into the history of Mormonism, there's some echoes of that sort of thinking that there was an ancient race of good people who were destroyed by Native Americans who are an inferior race.
The remaining mounds are in and around Millennium Park between the river and the highway, the Gerald Ford Freeway. In fact, these were almost destroyed. They wanted to put the highway right through them when they built it. The local native community prevented that from happening. There's a couple of dozen remaining mounds, but there were hundreds of mounds in and around Grand Rapids.
Grand Rapids was centered on the rapids and the river, which provided food and shelter and was also a place of significant spiritual meaning for local indigenous communities. So, people came here to bury their dead, to observe major holidays, and there were also some permanent villages here. There was a larger group of mounds downtown called the Converse Group that was bulldozed when they built Grand Rapids into the river to fill in those islands, which is unfortunate. If you go down to Ah-Nab-Awen park today, they're fake mounds. They're meant to represent the Converse Mounds, but they're not actual real burial mounds. We dug these up in the sixties and there's … there's people buried in them, right? They are graveyards. They're sacred sites. When we were digging them up, there wasn't a lot of respect for that as a grave site at the time. There's now legislation that would prohibit what they were doing at that point. And they found significant evidence of an advanced society, pottery, tools, jewelry. It's really quite impressive. And all of this still lies underneath the mounds down between the highway and the park. It's the oldest part of our city, and almost no one knows that it exists.
Isaac McCoy was probably the first white man to settle in Grand Rapids. He was a Baptist missionary. He was at the Treaty of Chicago and again recounts the same thing. It was all about barrels and barrels of whiskey. Grand Rapids is opened up by the Erie Canal. 1825 people start really coming into the area because they can finally get here and they do. The surveyor comes through, puts it all in nice little lines, and sells the land. And this works out pretty well because you steal the land and then you sell it and you make a lot of money at it. This is what Grand Rapids looked like in 1831 sketch. That's Noonday’s village on this side of the river. On the other side of the river, you can see the mission and the blacksmith. That's right downtown… used to be a couple of islands right downtown. That village in the foreground is basically where Rosa Parks Circle is today.
There's Isaac McCoy and he goes there. He goes into it from the beginning, as he says, haunted with the painful reflection that the Indians would soon be driven from this place by the ingress of white people. He basically says, my job was to go in and try to civilize them as fast as I could before the white people pushed them out of here and to save their souls. And so that's what he tries to do. He says at the bottom there, the experience of 200 years has shown to everybody that the Indian cannot prosper on small tracts of country surrounded by other people. Now that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Because what he means by that is when white people tend to get close to native people, they take their land. It doesn't mean they can't live near them, but it's always the blame is always put on the native people.
And this mythology develops that native people are actually racially bound for extinction. That something inherent to their racial biology means they can't survive in the modern world. And this is thought of as sad and not preventable. They are a noble savage, but they just can't exist in the modern world. So, the best we can do is put them on reservations and try to keep them alive for a little while longer in sort of hospice care until they go extinct. Right? Now that's ridiculous, right? But that was … everybody believed that at the time. Everybody believed that.
What he wanted to do is set up an Indian territory, and this is ultimately what the United States did. They set up Indian country in Oklahoma, right? Isaac McCoy from Little Grand Rapids, Michigan, testified in front of Congress about this and is one of, I would say, the principal advocates of Indian removal, right? He says the only way to save these people …again, it's always done for them, right? He says, Christians, my fellow Christians awaken from your lethargy and without delay, come forward with prayer and faith and zeal to the glorious work of elevating the depressed Aborigines to the privileges of citizens and the virtues of Christianity. Should the experience of an Indian colony by opposing obstacles fail, will it not the prediction of the fearful and unbelieving be fulfilled in the extermination of the Indian race. But in its success, an achievement of Christian enterprises anticipated then which none is more noble, right? The field is whitening for the harvest. Hallelujah, the Lord God omnipotent reigns, right?
So he's saying we either put them in a colony or they go extinct, right? And as a Christian, we need to put them in the colony. We take the land with whiskey and guns, and then we say, it's not good for you to be near us. We got to get you out of here, right? You can see the logic building.
And then it happens with Andy Jackson. Andy Jackson had served with Lewis Cass, had met with Isaac McCoy, had met with local native people. He was just a bad person, but he was president. When Michigan became a state and we kind of did that by flattering him, right? So Jackson, the city of Jackson, named after Andrew Jackson. Cass County is named after Lewis Cass. All sorts of things around Michigan are named after members of Andrew Jackson's cabinet because we wanted him to make us a state, and he did. As one of his final acts in office, he made Michigan a state in 1837. He also executed Indian removal. This is from his State of the Union address. He says the benevolent policy of the government steadily pursued for 30 years in relation to the removal of Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation. He is mostly concerned with the Cherokee, as you probably know, in Georgia. And he's concerned with the Cherokee because there is gold on Cherokee land that Andrew Jackson really wants. Again cannibalism, profit, greed, mammon, right? And he says, you know, maybe if we're …if we do this, they will finally cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized Christian community.
Now, he knew this was a lie, too, just like Ben Franklin did, because this man was the president of the Cherokee Nation. John Ross, this is not a wandering savage. John Ross had fought with Andy Jackson in the War of 1812, right, for the United States. He knows who this is. He's met with him. He wears suits. He speaks English. He's a Christian. And yet Andrew Jackson is portraying him as this barbarian. And he says, rightly considered our policy, it's not only liberal, but generous. We're doing it for your own good. And of course, this results in the Trail of Tears and thousands of Cherokee are marched through the snow to their deaths on the way to Oklahoma at the behest of Andrew Jackson carried out by his secretary of war, none other than Lewis Cass, right, who after leaving Michigan becomes secretary of war for Andy Jackson.
And then Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids. First guy here is this guy. Louis Campau was French. He made his money on furs, right? which is again an extractive, exploitative industry, right? Decimating beaver and other animal populations, selling the pelts as fast as they could get them. So he gets his money first that way. Then he spends that money buying all of downtown Grand Rapids for $90, a dollar twenty-five an acre. Pretty much the entire downtown Grand Rapids that you know today belonged to Louis Campau with his fur trading money, and then he sells that to other people and gets fabulously wealthy. He also helps negotiate Indian treaties because he speaks the local language, and he gets paid a lot of money to do that. So this man gets rich off just exploitation of people and natural resources. Same thing with this guy. Lucius Lyon. They …they fight over it. Lucius Lyon wanted to call the city Kent. That's why it's Kent County. Compromise. Campau wanted to call it Grand Rapids. That's also why downtown is so messed up because Lucius Lyon owned the part on the left and he wanted it nice and neat. And Louis Campau liked it a little bit wilder. He preserved old Native American routes, which is why you get those diagonal streets you probably hate downtown. Lake Drive right on our campus is an old Native American route that goes pretty much directly from the rapids downtown to Reeds Lake - that was a very common path that Louis Campau just made into a street.
Lucius Lyon wanted to bulldoze any any remnants and put it all on a grid, so Grand Rapids becomes a city in 1838, right after we become a state. Same year Potawatomi trail of death - we remove Potawatomi from Indiana, lesser known than the Cherokee Trail of Tears, fewer people, but some local indigenous people were on this. It was mostly from Indiana, but again, the Potawatomi move in and out of Indiana and Grand Rapids pretty seamlessly. They were the last to be forced out of the Lower Peninsula, the Potawatomi on the trail of death to Kansas, which was what Isaac McCoy had wanted.
Grand Rapids becomes a frontier town. And how do we get wealthy? Again Extraction. Kenosha Creek, meaning the place of the pike becomes Plaster Creek, where we get plaster for walls right there, mining for plaster here, which is the main ingredient today in drywall, right? We do that and we cut down the entire state. We deforest the entire state in about 50 years. Takes us 50 years from 1838, when we become a state to in the 1880’s, but we managed to cut down almost every tree in the lower peninsula. The only remaining pre-colonial trees in the entire lower peninsula are at Heartwood State pines. It's about a square mile up north. You can google it and go there and see what original white pines, our State Tree, looked like before we cut them all down. So, this is a wholesale deforestation. We often talk about Grand Rapids as the furniture city. You may have heard that Chicago burned down several times during this time period. All that was rebuilt with this timber, right? And that's how people got rich. When you walk around Heritage Hill and you see those old houses, you're looking at the legacy of settler colonialism in Grand Rapids. This money built those houses, the furniture factories, the timber, and we did all this believing that we were again doing the right thing, making it fruitful, helping the land multiply.
Now again, I don't think this is better use. I don't think deforesting the state was better, right? Plaster Creek has ended up being the Plaster Creek watershed, one of the most polluted waterways in the state in the heart of Grand Rapids. So I wouldn’t say that was a good call. Isaac McCoy's son writing about this in 1916 … Right? So getting close … A man who ironically is named John Calvin McCoy again repeating this: they were a doomed race. There was nothing we could do, right? He grew up as a child in Grand Rapids at the mission station. He knew native people.
Boarding school. These have been in the news, with the news out of Canada that thousands of people have been .. Or graves have been found. But there's three of these in Michigan. I'll just talk about one. This is the one in Mount Pleasant, the Saginaw Band of Chippewa. This ran from 1893 to 1934. Right? 300 students a year. Right. Not a small school. They are just now starting to do some forensic work on this site because official records say that only five children ever died here. Oral records say that people died here all the time. I would not be at all surprised if in the next couple of years, we get pretty disturbing news out of Saginaw.
Finally. Gerald Ford, our own only president, lived grew up on Union Street here, right? He was a member of a secret society at the University of Michigan, called
Michi-gauma. This is from 1966. He joined in the thirties. But Michi-gauma had actual Native American relics. Those weren't just costumes. Those were taken from grave sites and from people, and they had them in a room at the top of the Michigan student union, and they used them for ceremonies all the way up into the seventies. They gave each other Native American nicknames. This was a fraternity, right? So, Gerald Ford was Flip-‘em-back-buck. You know, they had titles like Squaw and this kind of stuff. It was incredibly racist and went on for a long time. They finally had to get rid of these relics in the year 2000, when Native-American and Black students at the University of Michigan discovered that this had been going on and was like, No, you probably shouldn't have that stuff. You should give it back to the tribes. They only changed their name in 2007.
Today happy to report indigenous people have not disappeared. There are still native people all around us. I first became interested in these issues because my wife worked for years as a nurse with the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi. So got to know many NHBP members and through them, members of the Pokagon Band, the Gun Lake Band, some of the other groups around town. So there are twelve federally recognized tribes in Michigan. There are over 500 in the United States. These are sovereign nations. Native Americans are political entities, not just racial groups.
I actually asked people in enrollment in MSDO [multi-cultural student development] and some other offices whether we ever enrolled a student from any of these groups, and we don't know. But the answer is probably not. We've had some Navajo students because of our boarding school, but to the best of everyone's knowledge, we have never had a local Native American come to this school, even though it's built on this land.
One notable exception is the actual local group to Grand Rapids is not federally recognized. The Grand River Band of Odawa, the descendants of Chief Noonday, do not have federal recognition. They've been working on it since 1994. The US government is delaying for reasons that are laughable. The last year, they've been delaying because of COVID 19. They say, We can't look at your case because of COVID. Well, what about the last 26 years? Could you look at the case, right? This has bipartisan support. They've gotten letters from people like Bill Huizenga, Republican and Calvin alum, and Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin. But the infrastructure at the BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is so bad that they have no idea when or if they're ever going to be given a free and fair hearing on this. Ron Yob is a friend of mine, tribal chair of the Grand River Band of Odawa, and he would like federal recognition. And, no, the first question that everyone asks is, Is it just about casino money? And it's not, right. I know Ron. I've known him for many years. He wants recognition because he deserves recognition.
Penny: If you are interested in seeing the entire lecture by Professor Kuilema, including the images that he refers to, a video of his whole lecture is part of a learning package that will be available soon through the Diversity and Inclusion for All project. To find this, visit our web page at calvin.edu/go/difa. If you're interested in learning about land acknowledgments, listen to our Episode 2: Introducing Land Acknowledgment. What is it? And also Episode 3: Whose wisdom do you trust? How to go about land acknowledgment?
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