The Privilege of Home: A 400 Year Family History of Immigration and Inhabitation on Native Land

• Main Author: Mahler, Kristine
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@UNO 2018
• Subjects: Nonfiction; anishina*
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/srcaf/2018/schedule/26; https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/context/srcaf/article/2207/viewcontent/auto_convert.pdf

This presentation culls together the extensive text-based, place-based, and experience-based research I completed on the history of immigration and inhabitation on native land from 1620 through 2018 through the specific lens of my ancestors: French settlers who lived in Kébec’s St. Lawrence Valley and immigrated to western Wisconsin around 1865, eventually settling in northern Minnesota. As I researched my ancestry alongside the history of white settlement and forced native resettlement in these regions, I recognized a pattern of repeated inhabitation—traced through baptismal, marriage, and death certificates—by my family onto recently-vacated native land. In my text-based research, I was riveted by the spaces left empty between the written historical chronicles repeating traditional colonization narratives and the implications of absenting and/or misrepresenting the native experience. I traveled to northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kébec to understand the landscapes and the specific sites which played important roles in my family’s movement as well as native relocation. I also have had the unique pleasure of transcribing my great-grandfather’s diaries, which revealed his adaptation to the Anishinabe’s seasonal usage of their land-base to which he, and other white settlers, were governmentally granted ownership. My presentation will also discuss the consequences of the privilege to seek home, and the necessity of cracking open settler history to make space for native–led history.