Charles E. Cleland Native American research collection, 1970-2008, and undated

Summary

Creator:

Cleland, Charles E., 1936-

Abstract:

The collection includes mostly photocopies of materials generated by various lawsuits, and other materials documenting Native Americans of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and First Peoples of Ontario, Canada, their history, culture, and relationship with the presiding government.Tribes documented are noted in the subject headings.

Extent:

117 cubic ft. (in 122 Boxes, 9 Ov. folders)

Language:

English

Authors:

Collection processed and finding aid created by many students, notably A. Binge and G. Agee, Sept. 2008-Feb. 2015; Marian Matyn, Sept. 2008-June 2016

Background

Scope and Content:

The collection includes mostly undated photocopies of materials generated by various tribal lawsuits against states and the United States (US) government in the collection. Some of the materials date back to the 1780s, but they are not originals, they are photocopies mostly made in the 1970s-1990s or later. There are some original reports and court records created during the time period of 1970-2008. The collection is rich in and dense in documenting Native Americans of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and First Peoples of Ontario, Canada, their history, culture, and relationship with the presiding government.

The collection is in original order. It is organized alphabetically by series by tribe or community seeking tribal status, reservation boundary (KBIC) case, tax case, or for hunting and fishing rights (Voight or LCO case) (105 boxes, 102.5 cubic feet). Within each series there are various subseries which may include: calendar documents (reference documents in chronological order), Cleland reports and reports of others (un/published), Cleland’s testimony as an expert witness, reference documents and/or un/published sources including newspaper or journal articles, books, maps, government reports, laws, land, legal and tax records, correspondence, business or personal records, excerpts from journals, diaries, and accounts, treaties, various US or Canadian court documents, miscellaneous and/or related documents, footnotes, project files, transcriptions of oral histories, finding aids, various types of maps, sketches, and genealogical and/or family charts. Some materials are bound volumes and others are oversized materials. Tribes or communities represented in the collection include:

Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Wisconsin) 2 boxes (2 cubic ft.); Bay Mills Indian Community (Michigan) 15 boxes (14.5 cubic ft.); Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa (Minnesota) 8 boxes (7.5 cubic ft.); Forest County Potawatomi (Wisconsin), Notre Dame Project 4 boxes (4 cubic ft.); Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC, Michigan) 10 boxes (10 cubic ft.); Lac Courte Oreilles [Lake Superior Ojibwa]– Voigt Case 4 boxes (4 cubic ft.); Menominee (Wisconsin) 13 Boxes (12.5 cubic ft.); Mille Lacs Chippewa (Minnesota) 21 boxes (19 cubic ft.) (Note: Box 1 is actually half Menominee and half Mille Lacs Chippewas.); Saginaw Chippewa (Michigan) 13 boxes (13 cubic ft.); Sarnia [Chippewas of Sarnia Band (Ontario, Canada) who prefer to be known as Aamjiwnaang First Nation] 9 boxes (9 cubic ft.); Stockbridge-Munsee (Wisconsin) 8 boxes (8 cubic ft.).

Additional case and reference materials are found at the end in Boxes A-M (12 boxes, 9 Oversized folders, 13 cubic feet). These include: Box A: Bay Mills, US v. MI, 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box B: Bay Mills, US v. MI, KBIC Tax Case, KBIC Boundary Case, Crown v Sarnia, 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box C: Crown v. Sarnia 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box D: KBIC Boundary Case 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box E: KBIC Boundary Case 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box F: Saginaw Case 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box G: Miscellaneous Unpublished reports 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box H Finding Aids 1 box (.25 cubic ft.); Box I: Various legal cases, acts, statutes, decisions in Canadian cases 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box J: LCO Case, Stockbridge-Munsee, Mille Lacs, Fond du Lac, Grand Portage 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box K: Crandon Mine, Menominee Case, treaties US 1 box (1 cubic foot); Box L: Menominee Documents (really 1 Oversized folder on shelf); Box M: Calendars, Reference documents 1 box (1 cubic foot).

Also included are 5x8 inch notecards (4 boxes, 1.5 cubic foot), which usually document in one box each: KBIC, Grand Portage, MI and MN Chippewas, and Voigt.

Lastly, nine oversized folders (larger than legal-size, about .5 cubic foot) include mostly photocopies of a wide variety of maps, treaty signers, genealogy notes and family tree, and land claims.

All boxes in the collection are 1 cubic foot boxes except for the following: Boxes #15, 25, 68, 74-75 are .5 cubic foot boxes; Box #113 is .25 cubic foot box, Box #117 is really an Overszied folder; Boxes #119-122 are 5x8 inch index card boxes.

Materials were collected from a plethora of local, state, and national archives and historical institutions, as well as tribal archives, and various courts, both American and Canadian.

Abbreviations: Professor Cleland and his staff used numerous, and sometimes various, abbreviations for institutions, record groups and/or series names or other citations. Some of these were obvious to the processors, others were not. Many of these abbreviations are not identified in this finding aid. For example, enclosure is abbreviated multiple ways. These variations were retained during processing. Some of these variations are obvious and can be deduced by researchers from the materials.

Also, due to the length of the collection, a number of abbreviations and grammatical changes were implemented by the archivist.

The archivist also deleted: ["no reference" and "incomplete reference"], the, a, or an (articles) at the beginning of a title; Anonymous or Author unknown or a.u.; unknown dates, undated, ND, or n.d. and s.u. Marian also changed: Microfilm to micro and “and” to and; and abbreviated certain common words, as noted below, and the names of months.

Abbreviations used widely by Professor Cleland, his staff, and Marian the Archivist include: ABCFM=American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; AFCP=American Fur Company Papers; AG=Attorney General; ARCOIA=Annual Report of Commissioners of Indian Affairs; B or Bx=Box; BBC=Bishop Baraga Collection; BIA=Bureau of Indian Affairs; ca.=circa; CCF=Central classified files; CMU=Central Michigan University; CHL=Clarke Historical Library; Co.=County; COIA=Commissioner/s of Indian Affairs; Corp.=Corporation; Dist.=District; E=East, not eastern; encl.=enclosure or enclosed; GLO=General Land Office; HR=House of Representatives; HS=Historical Society; ICC=Indian Claims Commission; IL=Illinois; IN=Indiana; JL=Journal; LC=Library of Congress; LLL=Letters of Lucius Lyon; LRBO-OHC=Little River Band-Oral History Collection; Ltd.=Limited; MH=Michigan History (a publication); MHM=Michigan History Magazine (a publication); MI=Michigan; Misc.=Miscellaneous; MPHC=Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections (a publication); MN=Minnesota; MS=Mississippi; Mss.=Manuscript; MTRL-JP=Metro Toronto Reference Library-Jarvis Papers; N=North, not Northern; NAM=National Archives microfilm; NEB=Nebraska; NWT=Northwest Territories; OIA=Office of Indian Affairs; US=United States; PAC=Public Archives of Canada (National Archives of Canada); PAO=Public Archives of Ontario; PAO-WJLB=Public Archives of Ontario-William Jones Letterbook; Qly=quarterly; rec=received; S=South, not southern; SAM=State Archives of Michigan; TWP=township; UCA=United Church Archives; U.P.=Upper Peninsula; US=United States; UWO, RC-EP= University of Western Ontario, Regional Collection-Evans Papers; W=West, not Western; w/=with; WI=Wisconsin; WL, UWO-WP =Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario, Wawanash Papers.

Also, the original punctuation used varies. A few of the original folder labels were crossed out partially or entirely. These variations were retained during processing.

Processing Notes: Only a few duplicate copies were withdrawn from the collection. Several items which had suffered physical damage mostly due to mud or dirt stains or being badly crumpled or torn were copied and the originals were withdrawn from the collection. (The total withdrawn from this collection was less than .25 cubic ft.).

The vast majority of the collection was organized into series by tribal name or topic, foldered, and labeled before it came to the Clarke. Original folders were maintained in the collection. We endeavored as much as possible to duplicate the original label headings (which varied somewhat from series to series) in the Box and folder listing. Items that were not foldered were foldered by the archivist, and those that were unlabeled were identified and labeled by the archivist.

Biographical / Historical:

Biography:

Charles E. “Chuck” Cleland is the son of Margaret and Charles Cleland. He was born on February 2, 19365 in Kane, Pennsylvania. He earned degrees from Denison University, Arkansas University and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1965.

As a professor of anthropology, Cleland taught at Michigan State University from 1965 until he retired in 2000. His research focus was on Native Americans, particularly the Ojibwa. He has written a number of important books contributing to scholarship on Michigan Native Americans and archaeology including: Rites of Conquest: the History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans (1992); (The) Place of the Pike (Gnoozhekaaning): a History of the Bay Mills Indian Community (2001), for which he used oral histories of tribal elders and tribal archival photographs. It was selected for the 2001 Read Michigan List by the State of Michigan; Art of the Great Lakes Indians (1973); Faith in Paper: the Ethnohistory and Litigation of Upper Great Lakes Indian Treaties (2011); and An Upper Great Lakes Archaeological Odyssey: Essays in Honor of Charles E. Cleland, about the fur trade archaeology of Fort Michilimackinac.

Professor Cleland has also edited and contributed to another of other books relating to Michigan Native Americans and/or archaeology, as well as writing a number of published reports related reports. Copies of these are all available in the CMU Libraries. In addition a small collection is housed at Michigan State University which consists of copies of U.S. military documents including discharge papers of Native American scouts.

Besides his contributions to scholarship, Professor Cleland and his associates in Aurora Research Associates researched a lot of Native American history for tribal law suits against the U.S. and state governments to attain tribal recognition. Professor Cleland was often called as an expert witness to testify. As a result, he and Aurora accumulated millions of p. of copies of government and other sources, primary and secondary from a multitude of institutions and people, dating back as far as 1784, compiled statistics, maps, reports, correspondence, and court documents, and prepared statements, reports, and exhibits. It is these materials that compose this collection. Almost all the materials are photocopies dating from the 1970s-2008, except for court records and correspondence also created in this time period.

As of 2015, Professor Cleland lives in Charlevoix, Michigan, with his family. (This information is from several websites including zoominfo.com Charles Cleland; goodread.com Charles E. Cleland; Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collection Charles E. Cleland Collection finding aid at archives. Msu.edu; and the CMU CENTRA catalog, all viewed in Jan. 2015.)

Acquisition Information:

Acc# 74763

Arrangement:

Arrangement is in original order by series and subseries.

Subjects

Click on terms below to find any related finding aids on this site.

Subjects:

Oral history--Michigan.
Potawatomi Indians--Government relations.
Potawatomi Indians--History.
Potawatomi Indians--Wisconsin.
Ojibwa Indians--Government relations.
Ojibwa Indians--Michigan.
Ojibwa Indians--History.
Ojibwa Indians--Genealogy.
Ojibwa Indians--Legal status, laws, etc.--Wisconsin.
Indians of North America--Michigan.
Indians of North America--Wisconsin.
Indians of North America--Minnesota.
Indians of North America--Ontario--Sarnia--Treaties.
Indians of North America--Ontario--Sarnia--Claims.
Indians of North America--Land tenure--Ontario--Sarnia.
Indians of North America--Government relations.
Indians of North America--Treaties.
Indians of North America--Land tenure.
Indians of North America--Great Lakes Region (North America)--Treaties--History.
Indians of North America-Legal status, laws, etc.--Great Lakes Region (North America)--History.
Indians of North America--Legal status, laws, etc.--History.
Indians of North America--Land tenure--Great Lakes Region (North America)--History.

Names:

Michigan. Office of Attorney General.
United States. Bureau of Indian Affairs--History.
United States. Office of Indian Affairs.
Stockbridge and Munsee Tribe of Indians.
Cleland, Charles E.
McClurken, James M.
Clifton, James A.

Places:

Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians of the Bad River Reservation, Wisconsin.
Bay Mills Indian Community, Michigan.
Bay Mills Indian Community, Michigan--Land tenure.
Bay Mills Indian Community, Michigan--History.
Bay Mills Indian Community, Michigan--Claims.
Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa Indians.
Forest County Potawatomi Community, Wisconsin.
Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin
Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.
Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin--History.
Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin--Government relations.
Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians.
Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan--History.
Aamjiwnaang First Nation.
Crandon Mine (Wis.)
Michigan--History.
Minnesota--History.
Wisconsin--History.
Ontario--History.