Throughline - The Ojibwe Nation

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

In the face of United States westward expansion in the 19th century, Native people fought to preserve their land and way of life. Today on the show: the story of how one Ojibwe leader tried to keep his people and land together by building a nation within a nation.  To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Ramtin Adab Lui. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Up until this point in the series, we've been talking about the birth of the United States as a nation and how different groups of people pushed for the expansion of what it meant to be American. But the reality is, native people inhabited the lives. land that we now call the United States long before Europeans set foot on North America. And as the U.S. continued to grow and expand, native peoples had different experiences and

relationships with the strangers that arrived on their shores. Today on the show, NPR reporter Sequoia Carrillo and through-line producer Anya Steinberg bring us the story of the Ojibwe people and how in the face of U.S. westward expansion They created a nation to try to preserve their land and way of life. That story, after a quick break. The story goes back over a thousand years to how Ojibwe people first came to the Great Lakes region. It feels different when your family has been buried in the same place longer than America has been a country. This is Anton Troyer.

He's a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University. For him, the story of how the Ojibwe people ended up calling these lakes home is a personal one. At one point in time, just a couple thousand years ago, we lived on the East Coast, Atlantic Coast, which was a land abundant in small game, big game, well-suited for indigenous agriculture, lots of fish in the sea, lots of fish in inland lakes. We can track the beginning of Ojibwe people to Algonquian language tribes from the East Coast, We had prophets who appeared and said, move west to the land where food grows on water. It was a reference to the wild rice.

And there was a long migration. And it was a long, slow process. For centuries, Ojibwe people kept moving. And as a result, we ended up spanning a huge geography thousands of miles. Until they made it to the Great Lakes region. But even then, movement was still a part of life. Because of this persistent migration pattern over a long period of time, time, if someone got too bossy or even just got too much influence, someone else was usually

moving down the river and saying they're not my chief. So Ojibwe culture tended to be very tolerant of cultural variation, but very intolerant of being told what to do. There was no such thing as a national Ojibway identity. So there was no such thing as an Ojibwe nation. For decades, Ojibwe people lived in small communities across the region. They brokered deals with the neighboring Dakota people, as well as the French, the British, and after the American Revolution, the U.S. government. The United States do engage to guarantee to the Afro-Sid nation of Delaware's and their heirs, all their territorial rights in the fullest and most ample manner, 1778. And that's when things began to change in a big way, because the more. more U.S. settlers and business leaders encroached on OJibway homelands, the more some leaders

felt they had to act as a single entity. It's important to note that that was a new development, and it naturally met with a lot of resistance. But still, the idea of an Ojibwe nation was fast becoming an appealing tool for negotiating with the U.S. government. And perhaps no one saw that more clearly than the chief of the Mississippi band of Ojibwe, Bogunegisig, or as he was known in English, Hole in the Day. He was distinguished for his eloquence, wisdom, and force of argument. The young men of his tribe acknowledged him as a leader.

Missionary Alfred Brunson. Hole in the Day had big dreams to lead the Ojibwe people, and his ideas were starting to work. People were drawn to him. One day, after drinking a little too much whiskey with some fur trading, he fell off his wagon in a stupor and was crushed. It seemed like the end of his great vision for the Ojibwe people, but as he lay dying, he summoned his son.

And with his last breath, he said, Take the tribe by the hand. Show them how to walk. His 19-year-old son took his name and became whole in the day the younger. He vowed to make his father's dream come true and promised to usher in a new era of one Ojibwe nation. Holon the Day was quite brash.

He sometimes inflamed other Ojibwe leaders when he would claim to be chief of them all or a chief of an entire region that included multiple villages, many of which had their own chiefs. Hall in the Day was young. He was cocky and he was ready to make his mark. And he made that obvious at his first treaty negotiations. in 1847. His father had just passed away,

and there might have been 200 other Ojibwe leaders from around the region there, and he said, he came a day late, and then he said, stop what you're doing. Now, if I say sell, we sell, and if I say no, we don't. You have called together

all the chiefs and headmen of the nation. That was useless. For they do not own the land, It belongs to me. My father, by his bravery, took it from the zoo. He died a few moons ago, and what belonged to him became mine. He, by his courage and perseverance, became head chief. And when he died, I took his place, and am consequently chief over all the nation.

Which was ridiculous and probably offensive, but really impressed the Americans. Here were powerful chiefs. some of them 70 or 80 years old, who, before his coming, spoke sneeringly of him, as a boy who could have no voice in the council, saying there was no use in waiting for him. But when he appeared, they became his most submissive and obedient subjects. And this in a treaty in which a million acres of land were seated. The terms of the treaty were concluded between the commissioners and young Hole in the Day alone. The move was a big gamble, but it paid off.

Holm the Day the Younger quickly ascended to power. He took the helm at a moment when native land across North America was being lost at an alarming rate. He was one of the most effective and knowledgeable Ojibwe leaders of his time. He had traveled to Washington, D.C. many times. He was not a passive leader just waiting to see what would happen to the people. He refused to seed land without putting up a fight for what he thought was best for the Ojibwe. people. Though it may cost me my liberty, it is my duty, and I will continue to speak and act also, till the wrongs of my people shall be righted. And he was not afraid of the personal consequences.

Certainly it is true that Whole in the Day had very strong and powerful friends and very strong and powerful enemies. People tended to either love him or hate him. The U.S. government, for its part, was more than happy to have just one single Ojibwe leader to negotiate with. Hole in the day plays a heavy hand, and he was very, very effective. But the game was rigged. He had just come from Washington, D.C. It was 1868. The previous year, Holn the Day had negotiated another very controversial treaty that was trying to consolidate all Ojibwe people onto one single reservation.

It was a hard deal to swallow. He had some really telling things that he told his people. He said, look, these are heartbreaking times for our people. At the time, Westward migration was at a fever pitch. The government had just purchased Alaska, and the idea of manifest destiny, the God-given right of white Americans to expand across the entire continent, was being realized.

Holn-the-day saw all this and adapted his strategies. He told his people, I would love to say that there's a way to get all the white people to leave us alone and to leave our lands and let us live as we always have. But I don't think there's a way to go back in time. But there is a way forward. The way Holm the day saw it, if the U.S. government was hell-bent on putting his people onto a single reservation,

then it needed to build the infrastructure that would set them up for success. And so he said, I want them to build a house for every single one of you. I want them to build a grist mill and a sawmill so that we can adopt these modern enterprises and have good homes. And to make sure they actually got these things. Hole in the day had a plan. They would all stay put until the reservation was built.

Don't go anywhere. If you go, we will lose our leverage to get those things, which are promised to us in this treaty. But times were really tough. And some people left in search of us. a better life. It also became clear that the Americans were not living up to their side of the bargain. And Holmondei said, well, if they're not going to work with me, we might have to do this a different way. And he said, I'm going to go back to Washington, D.C. He set out on a late June day in 1868.

But on his way, he was accosted by assassins, pulled off of his carriage, stabbed multiple times. shot and killed. The impact of this death was immediate. It was devastating for many of his people. And it was devastating for generations. Holmody's death created a power vacuum that resulted in the loss of more and more Ojibwe land. You had lots of white settlement that immediately flowed after his death. And so, you know, it was devastating for his friends and it was devastating for his friends.

and it was devastating for his enemies in the long run. The vision Holden the Day had for his people would never be. Instead, his death opened up the floodgates and left the nation vulnerable to the violent tides of the time. From the building of dams that flooded Ojibwe homes, to the growth of the timber industry, all the way to the process of allotment. Allotment was a federal policy

that divided reservation land into privately owned, These parcels were then allotted to tribal members. Before, most land had been owned in common. What this really means is tribes collectively owned all their land. Allotment was all about introducing private ownership, which was already becoming a cornerstone of the American dream. And it dovetailed with another process. This is the big era of cultural assimilation.

So tremendous pressure put on Indian people to assimilate. This is Brenda Child. She's an Ojibwe historian and professor at the University of Minnesota. Allotment was one step in forcing this assimilation process. And in the United States, there was kind of consensus that Indian people needed to change. Kill the Indian, save the man, would soon be a common refrain. The idea was to get rid of all Native culture at any cost. There were people around the United States and in Washington and in kind of reform circles

who believed at that time that Indian people were people of the past, right, that they weren't really going to kind of continue into the future as tribal people. So if Indian people can't survive as tribal people, maybe they can just survive. And so they can become citizens of the United States eventually. They can speak English, they can become Christians, they can Americanize, and then they can move into the mainstream of American society. An allotment was seen as a way to accelerate that process of Americanization. They've got as far as they can go because they own their land in common.

There is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. It's funny because a policy like the Allotment Act of 1887, when you look at it and you read it, It's very technical. And in some ways, it sounds like it's going to protect Indians. It was seen as so progressive. And the most progressive of Indian reformers favored the allotment of reservations. The idea was that Native families would own their own land. They could farm it and build generational wealth just like white Americans.

They too could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But from the beginning, the system was flawed. You know, sometimes there's a word that people don't like to use called conspiracy. Politicians and timber companies and banks in Minnesota conspired with one another to dispossess Indians of their land. Individual families were left to the mercy of businessmen who did whatever it took to snatch up land, parcel by parcel. Not all Native nations and tribes participated in allotment the same,

way. Even among the Ojibwe people, the experience was different. But for many native people, the process of allotment and U.S. westward expansion left them estranged from their own land. By the end of the allotment era, tribes had lost control of over 90 million acres of land. That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. If you want to hear more about the lasting impact allotment had on different Ojibwe bands, make sure to check out the full-length episode called A Tale of Two Tribal Nations. And join us next week, where we continue the story of U.S. expansion beyond the continental U.S.

It's the Teddy Roosevelt era. It's the era of machismo, of doing things. Women were excluded, people of color excluded, but men like Minor Keith, the world belonged to them. And it was theirs for the taking. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Morrill And edited by Christina Kim with help from the Thuline production team.

Music as always by me, Ramtin Arablui and my band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Ramtin Arablui. And Randa Abd al-Fattah. Thank you for listening.