Closing the Circle: Restoring the Seasonal Round to the Ceded Territories

• Main Authors: George R. Spangler, Great Lakes Indian Fish, Wildlife Commission, George Spangler, All Rights Reserved
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Seasonal round; sustainable use; treaty rights; Treaty of 1837; Ojibwe traditions; Arctic; Arctic Ocean
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.190.3196; http://www.glifwc.org/Accordian_Stories/GeorgeSpangler.pdf

For thousands of years, the original inhabitants of North America met their needs for sustenance from the lands and waters stretching from the Gulf of Mexico, north to the Arctic Ocean. The multitude of cultural adaptations manifest in the land masses of the New World would change dramatically in the half-millennium after 1492 as the Columbian Exchange precipitated broadly disparate flows of mineral and biological resources, diseases, and technologies, rupturing the temporal and material foundations of cultures that had developed over thousands of years. Native cultures that had evolved in northerly latitudes a seasonal round of activities, traditions and technologies to cope with the climate and physical geographies of their environments, found themselves immersed in rapidly changing social, economic and political structures with no demonstrated histories of long-term sustainability. In this brief retrospective, we examine resource management in the ceded territories over the past quarter-century to see if implementation of the treaty-guaranteed rights in the upper Great Lakes region is on track to restoring the seasonal round essential to the cultural awareness of the Chippewa. We do this by evaluating changes in the status of renewable resources in the region, and identifying how Chippewa harvest relates to the sustainability of these resources.