In an auditorium in Belcourt, North Dakota, on a chilly October day in 1932, Robert Bruce and his fellow tribal citizens held the political fate of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in ...their hands. Bruce, and the others, had been asked to adopt a tribal constitution, but he was unhappy with the document, as it limited tribal governmental authority. However, white authorities told the tribal nation that the proposed constitution was a necessary step in bringing a lawsuit against the federal government over a long-standing land dispute. Bruce's choice, and the choice of his fellow citizens, has shaped tribal governance on the reservation ever since that fateful day.In this book, Keith Richotte Jr. offers a critical examination of one tribal nation's decision to adopt a constitution. By asking why the citizens of Turtle Mountain voted to adopt the document despite perceived flaws, he confronts assumptions about how tribal constitutions came to be, reexamines the status of tribal governments in the present, and offers a fresh set of questions as we look to the future of governance in Native America and beyond.
The Chippewa Cornell, Richard D
2017, 2017-05-03
eBook
Inspired by August Derleth's seminal book The Wisconsin, Richard D. Cornell traveled the Chippewa River from its two sources south of Ashland to where it joins the Mississippi. Over several decades ...he returned time and again in his red canoe to immerse himself in the stories of the Chippewa River and document its valley, from the Ojibwe and early fur traders and lumbermen to the varied and hopeful communities of today. Cornell shares tales of such historical figures as legendary Ojibwe leader Chief Buffalo, world famous wrestler Charlie Fisher, and supercomputer innovator Seymour Cray, along with the lesser-known stories of local luminaries such as Dr. John "Little Bird" Anderson. Cornell gathered firsthand stories from diners and dives, local museums and landmarks, quaint small-town newspaper offices, and the homes of old-timers and local historians. Through his conversations with ordinary people, he gets at the heart of the Chippewa and shares a history of the river that is both one of a kind and deeply personal.
Chippewa Lake is an idyllic waterfront community in north-central Michigan, popular with retirees and weekenders. The lake is surrounded by a rural farming community, but the area is facing a ...difficult transition as local demographics shift, and as it transforms from an agriculture-based economy to one that relies on wage labor. As farms have disappeared, local residents have employed a variety of strategies to adapt to a new economic structure. The community, meanwhile, has been indelibly affected by the advent of newcomers and retirees challenging the rural cultural values. An anthropologist with a background in sociology, Cindy L. Hull deftly weaves together oral accounts, historic documents, and participant surveys compiled from her nearly thirty years of living in the area to create a textured portrait of a community in flux.
A paucity of research exists regarding the millennial-scale response of inland alluvial streams to abrupt base-level fall. Studies of modern systems indicate that, over short time scales, the ...response is a diffusion-like process of upstream-propagating incision. In contrast, evidence from the lower Chippewa River (LCR), located in the upper Midwest of the USA, suggests that autogenic controls operating over time scales of several millennia can overwhelm diffusion, resulting in incision that is prolonged and episodic. During the Last Glacial Maximum, the LCR drained the Chippewa Lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet to the glacial upper Mississippi River (UMR). As a meltwater stream, it aggraded and filled its valley with glacial outwash, as did its largest tributaries, which were also meltwater streams. Its nonglacial tributaries aggraded, too, filling their valleys with locally derived sediment. During deglaciation, the UMR incised at least twice, abruptly lowering the LCR's base level — ~15m at 16ka or earlier and an additional 40m at ca. 13.4ka. Each of these base-level falls initiated incision of the LCR, led by upstream migrating knickpoints. The propagation of incision has, however, been a lengthy process. The optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages of terrace alluvium indicate that, by 13.5ka, incision had advanced up the LCR only 15km, and by 9ka, only 55km. The process has also been episodic, resulting in the formation of fill-cut terraces (inferred from GPR surveys and exposures of terrace alluvium) that are younger and more numerous in the upstream direction. Autogenic increases in sediment load and autogenic bed armoring, the result of periodic tributary-stream rejuvenation and preferential winnowing of fines by the incising river, may have periodically caused knickpoint migration and incision to slow and possibly stop, allowing lateral erosion and floodplain formation to dominate. A decline in sediment flux from stabilizing incised tributary stream systems would have led to renewed knickpoint migration and incision when floods of sufficient magnitude to breach the channel armor occurred. Minimal floodplain development along the upper section of the present-day LCR, along with the channel morphology of an unstable wandering gravel-bed river immediately downstream from it, suggest that the river is still responding to the base-level falls that happened many millennia ago. The autogenic controls on the LCR's response to UMR incision are a direct consequence of the thick fills of noncohesive sediment that accumulated in its valley and the valleys of its tributary streams during the Late Wisconsinan, making the LCR a prime example of a former proglacial river that remains a paraglacial fluvial system.
•The response of former proglacial alluvial streams to base-level fall can be complex.•Autogenic variations in sediment supply and bed armoring are likely key controls.•The result is upstream propagating incision that is episodic and prolonged.•Abundant glacial-age alluvial fill likely affects the autogenic incision process.•Former proglacial streams can be characterized as paraglacial fluvial systems.
Contemporary Indigenous sf writing demonstrates how modern interactions with landscapes, waters, and ecologies are troubled by socioenvironmental problems as current social processes increasingly ...drive future changes to places recognizable in the present day. In the resulting ecocritical dystopias, a focus on geographical traces relatable to the real world permits Indigenous writers imagining the future to connect their narratives more urgently and tangibly to issues relevant today. Social dynamics drive and are driven by the alterations to environments and places within such Indigenous sf works. In its speculative presentation of environmental, geographical, cultural, and other shifts from the time of modern society, this body of fiction draws from a variety of concerns to ponder why our actions today might produce dystopian futures—and to consider how better choices and futures might be possible. Through a reading of recent Indigenous sf writing and a focus on the cases studies of Harold Johnson’s Corvus (2015) and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), this paper will examine ecocritical dystopianism through the lens of contemporary Indigenous sf writing.
Many of the English translations of Indigenous languages that we commonly use today have been handed down from colonial missionaries whose intent was to fundamentally alter or destroy prior ...Indigenous knowledge and praxis. In this text, author Mark D. Freeland develops a theory of worldview that provides an interrelated logical mooring to shed light on the issues around translating Indigenous languages in and out of colonial languages. In tandem with other linguistic and narrative methods, this theory of worldview can be employed to help root out the reproduction of colonial culture in Indigenous languages and can be a useful addition to the repertoire of tools needed to return to life-giving relationships with our environment. These issues of decolonization are highlighted in the trajectory of treaty language associated with relationships to land and their present-day importance. This book uses the 1836 Treaty of Washington and its contemporary manifestation in Great Lakes fishing rights and the State of Michigan’s 2007 Inland Consent Decree as a means of identifying the role of worldview in deciphering the logics embedded in Anishinaabe thought associated with these relationships to land. A fascinating study for students of Indigenous and linguistic disciplines, this book deftly demonstrates the significance of worldview theory in relation to the logics of decolonization of Indigenous thought and praxis.
During the early reservation era federal policies were crafted and implemented with the overarching objective to progress Native peoples along the social evolutionary ladder toward self-sufficiency ...and societal integration into the fabric of Euro-American civilization. A central area of directed social change among reservation communities was American Indian families and households. Federal bureaucrats and Indian reformers believed that the home was the keystone of political, economic, and social order. A civilized home, policymakers believed, was a cornerstone to living in a civilized society. Thus, American Indian societies must be structurally reorganized, economically and socially, to model targeted attributes of Euro-American society. The ideal familial household was nuclear, composed of a husband, wife, and children. Using primary documentation, in concert with the ethnohistorical record, this paper examines the manner in which federally imposed political policies and socio-economic forces affected Chippewa-Cree family structure and fertility during the early twentieth century reservation period.
Core Ideas
O horizons account for the majority of DOM entering B horizons in these sandy soils.
There was less exchange with SOM in sugar maple stands compared to red pine stands.
Microbial ...processing of DOM inputs appears to be important in the formation of SOM.
Dissolved organic matter (DOM) translocated from O horizons has been viewed as the main source of subsoil carbon (C) in Spodosols. However, recent studies in other soil types have concluded that little O horizon DOM reaches the subsoil directly. We investigated whether C derived from O horizons contributes to deep‐soil C stores in six Spodosol profiles under coniferous (red pine) or deciduous (sugar maple) forests. We used spectroscopic, stable‐isotope and pyrolysis‐gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy analysis of DOM and solid phase soil samples to assess whether O horizon C was transported directly to deep soil horizons or had been exchanged with mineral soil organic matter (SOM) pools. All three approaches indicated that O horizons are the source of the majority of DOM entering B horizons, with little contribution from desorbed SOM. Despite a greater stock of O horizon C in red pine stands, there was no difference between forest types in the quantity of C delivered to B horizons (18 g C m–2 y–1). However, C derived from O horizons accounted for ∼95% of the C entering B horizons in sugar maple stands, but only ∼80% in red pine stands. Molecular analysis of DOM and SOM also showed a greater resemblance of B horizon SOM to DOM in sugar maple stands; however, it also clearly indicated the importance of microbial processing of input C in the formation of B horizon SOM. Our results demonstrate the strong connection between O horizons and deep soil C stocks in these sandy Spodosols and indicate that future changes in the quantity or quality of DOM entering the mineral soil have the potential to alter the delivery of surface C to depth.
Accurately determining sediment loads is necessary for managing river environments but is difficult because multiple processes can lead to large discharge‐independent changes in sediment transport. ...Thus, estimations of sediment load using discharge–sediment rating curves fit to sparse or historical sediment‐transport measurements can be inaccurate, necessitating alternative approaches to reduce uncertainty. Continuous sediment‐transport measurements reduce uncertainty because they can be used to detect discharge‐independent changes in transport and are therefore unaffected by hysteresis.
We used largely continuous approaches to measure sand transport in the lower Chippewa River, a large sand‐supplying tributary to the Mississippi River. We used side‐looking acoustic‐Doppler profilers to continuously measure suspended‐sand concentration, and bedform‐tracking techniques to episodically measure bedload transport. Bedload transport was then continuously estimated using a discharge‐dependent ratio of bedload to suspended‐sand transport. This approach allowed determination of sand loads that were not estimated based only on water discharge. Our continuous suspended‐sand measurements show that hysteresis between discharge and suspended‐sand concentration occurs during most floods. Quasi‐continuous bed‐elevation measurements using a scour monitor show that lags between discharge and dune geometric adjustment is also common, causing hysteresis between discharge and bedload transport during floods. Furthermore, comparisons of our measurements with historical sediment‐transport measurements indicate large discharge‐independent declines in both suspended‐sand and bedload transport since the 1980s. These findings indicate that sand transport is a non‐stationary function of water discharge over timescales ranging from within individual floods to decades. Consequently, although our continuous‐measurement approach yields only a ~20–30% improvement over rating‐curve estimates of sand load over multi‐year periods, our approach yields up to a factor‐of‐five improvement in sand‐load estimates over the shorter, within a flood timescales, over which the largest discharge‐independent changes in sand transport occur.
Large variability between discharge and sand load is typical in most rivers, thus, using traditional discharge‐sediment rating curves to estimate sediment loads has large uncertainty. We minimize this uncertainty by continuously measuring suspended‐sand load, and link episodic measurements of bedload to the suspended‐sand load to develop continuous estimates of bedload. This reduces error in estimating loads because transport is heavily affected by the systematic variability in shear velocity and bed‐sand grain size, which both affect suspended‐sand and bedload transport.
This study examines trends in podzolization – both temporally and with depth – as indicated by translocation of dissolved organic carbon (DOC), iron (Fe) and aluminum (Al) in soil water. Water as ...saturated flow was captured by zero-tension lysimeters installed below the O, E and B horizons of six Spodosol pedons in Michigan, USA. Over a 2-year timespan, we sampled soil water on 36 different dates, resulting in 505 samples. All samples were analyzed for DOC, whereas Fe and Al contents were determined for a subset of 227 samples.
Cumulative water fluxes are high during both spring snowmelt and the fall (autumn) season, when much water is moving as saturated flow. Water flux rates are much greater during snowmelt, and when averaged over all horizons, 1.15 times more water is translocated through the soil during snowmelt than in fall, even though the latter is routinely twice as long. Translocation of DOC out of the O horizon is a dominant process in these soils during snowmelt, peaking in mid-snowmelt. It peaks again – even higher – in fall, as rains strip C from fresh litter. Overall, little DOC leaves the soil system; B horizons are effective traps for C being transported in soil water. Surprisingly, E horizons retain DOC in almost all seasons, but particularly in fall and early snowmelt, as water percolates through C-rich, fresh litter. The thick, bright, C-poor E horizons in these soils suggest that, over long timescales, in situ mineralization of C exceeds the net retention of DOC from the O horizons above. Translocation of Fe and Al in soil water also has a distinct annual bimodality, largely following that of DOC. This component of podzolization peaks in mid-snowmelt and again late in fall. On an annual basis, considerably more Al moves in soil water than Fe; 1.9 times more Al than Fe is translocated out of E horizons, and 1.8 times more Al is lost from B horizons.
Our study supports existing pedogenic theory for the snowy midlatitudes, in which snowmelt is seen as a key period for podzolization. Daily rates of translocation of metals and DOC moving in saturated flow during snowmelt are considerably higher than for any other time of year. Our study also sheds new light on the importance of fall rains to podzolization. Although the daily rates of translocation for fall are much less than during snowmelt, the greater length of the season, the relatively high frequency of rain events, and the abundance of fresh C combine to make fall an important period for translocation of metals and DOC. Thus, our study highlights that podzolization here has a short but intense “pulse” during snowmelt, and a second, less intense but longer period during fall. Little podzolization occurs during winter, and during summer, translocation occurs only during infrequent, large storms.
•Lysimeter water captured for two years in six Spodosol pedons.•Water was analyzed for DOC, Fe and Al.•Podzolization occurs mainly during snowmelt and in fall.•Rates of podzolization are highest during snowmelt.•Prolonged fall rains make this an important time for podzolization as well.
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