During the last month, I’ve read (or listened to) two books of history of different Native American peoples, Staci Drouillard’s Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe and Elizabeth Fenn’s Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. These narratives took two different approaches, and they have both helped me learn more about the indigenous communities of my home country as well as think more about writing, nonfiction, and stories.
Walking the Old Road
Drouillard’s book traces the history of Chippewa City on the shores of Lake Superior. Chippewa City was an Ojibwe community, near which the white town of Grand Marais grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drouillard grew up in Grand Marais, a place that to many Minnesotans is a well-known tourist destination along the North Shore. Drouillard herself is descended from both indigenous and white members of these two communities. Walking the Old Road tells the broad story of Anishinaabe people, then focuses on the development, changes, and colonization of Chippewa City, embedded with the author’s family history.
I listened to the audiobook of Walking the Old Road, which is read by the author. Drouillard actively pushes back against harmful narratives about indigenous communities–she quotes the statements made by early white settlers about Ojibwe people and challenges their judgements, shares elements of Ojibwe oral tradition, records interviews with elders in her community, and carefully traces through historical records the way individual plots of land along the North Shore were taken from the native community through various laws, business ventures, and individual transactions. She describes the changing economy, as the indigenous communities engaged with white settlers in the fur trade, later selling timber resources, then as both of these options fell away, making money through the growing tourism industry by selling craftwork, before this too was overtaken by mass-market, generic, white-made “Indian” merchandise.
Through these very specific, documented stories, Drouillard gives concrete depictions of the injustices of colonization. She talks about her own realizations, over the course of this project, that the story of what happened on the North Shore is not very different from what happened throughout North America.
Encounters at the Heart of the World
I knew nothing about the Mandan People before reading Fenn’s book, although my husband, who grew up in Montana, knew about them because of the travels of Lewis and Clark. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2015, and it is a monumental accomplishment of research and narrative. Fenn incorporates accounts by white fur traders and information from Dakota winter counts, recorded narratives of indigenous people from various cultures that interacted with the Mandans, as well as archaeological and meteorological information.
Mandan people during the early periods of colonization had an impressive agricultural tradition, growing huge quantities of corn that made them wealthy among the peoples of the Great Plains. They had large trading networks with peoples north, west, and south and religious traditions that reenacted their own history. Fenn uses the available documents to assemble a detailed narrative that reaches its climax with a decimating smallpox epidemic in 1837.
Fenn’s work is rigorous, copiously footnoted with source information. It was impressive to see this historian at work, finding what information was available and placing it into the context of other data to try to identify what this meant for the Mandans as a community.
Although Fenn did bring her narrative up to the present day with some depictions of present-day Mandan people, exemplified in a contemporary Okipa religious ceremony, I was disappointed in the way she largely skipped over what happened between 1837 and today. I understand that, as a historian, Fenn has an area of specialization that she works within. Yet this gap in the narrative has the unfortunate effect of giving the impression that the Mandans essentially disappeared, and this idea of indigenous peoples being property of the past is a dangerous one. I also wondered what Mandan oral history says about the events she describes. This wasn’t addressed in the book.
I tried to find information about what Mandan people think about Fenn’s book. One reviewer on Goodreads says that there has been some criticism from Mandan people based on Fenn’s discussion of their historical origins–where the Mandans lived in the distant past. I haven’t been able to find more than this. The Mandans today are a part of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also called the Three Affiliated Tribes.
Writing thoughts
Both of these books approached history in different ways. Drouillard’s focus was much more recent than Fenn’s, and so she had a different set of resources available–interviews, land deeds, photographs. Fenn was working to reconstruct a narrative from a much earlier time.
I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. Encountering these two narratives was refreshing–it reminded me of the importance of facts, concrete reality, that artistic representations in literature, although they teach us so much, although I recognize the truth in them, cannot do all of the things that history can.
I also recognize the perspective of the historian in the telling, and this is something that I think the study of literature makes me pay more attention to than I would otherwise–both Fenn and Drouillard are coming to their writing from particular vantage points: Fenn as a professor and historian from outside the Mandan community, Drouillard from a place of personal connection. Drouillard’s narrative is explicitly political, forthrightly pointing out injustices. Fenn’s book I think also has the power to push back against injustice by revealing the rich history of this group of people, but as I wrote above, I think its focus limits it in this regard. At the same time, I was so impressed by Fenn’s weaving together of so many sources, and the expansiveness of the story that she tells, something that Drouillard’s work does not attempt to the same degree.
Writers of fiction and nonfiction are always making choices. We all choose which words, which images, which stories to lift up, and we all present readers with a text that will influence their ideas and feelings. Historians are constrained in that they must work with recorded data, assembling a narrative from those disparate pieces, but the factual roots lend these stories an import that can be difficult to achieve in fiction.
I came across the idea once, I cannot remember where, that books should be read in pairs, that when we read two books on a topic, or from a place, we see more by the contrast. I think that’s true, and these two books have taught me much.
I’ve moved on for the time being back to fiction. I’m at the beginning of Tess Uriza Holthe’s novel of the battle between Japan and the US over the Philippines, When the Elephants Dance. But some nonfiction is on my horizon, gifts from Christmas that I’m looking forward to reading soon. There’s always something more on my reading list.
Thank you for stopping by, and best wishes,
Jimmy
Words like trees 
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