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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.

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.

The Midwest family travel album contains approximately 150 photographs showing travel and leisure activities in Virginia, New York, Vermont, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Georgia that were likely compiled by a friend or relative of lumber executive and one-time mayor of Manistee, Michigan, Charles J. Canfield.

The Midwest family travel album contains approximately 150 photographs showing travel and leisure activities in New York, Vermont, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Georgia that were likely compiled by a friend or relative of lumber executive and one-time mayor of Manistee, Michigan, Charles J. Canfield.

The album (26 x 35 cm) has a black cloth binding. Photographs of interest taken in Vermont and New York include rural views, country roads, a woman bicycling, and a group relaxing beside the Batten Kill River in Eagleville, New York. Images from Sioux City, Iowa, include views of public buildings, a golf tournament between Sioux City and Le Mars, a football game between Sioux City and Council Bluffs, an interior view of a woman working at a desk, a high school group on stage in blackface, a shooting expedition, and group portraits of young people at the Sioux City High School and in costume at a "hobo party." Michigan-related photographs include views of Charles Canfield's cottage in Onekama, Michigan, Canfield's yacht "Uvira," views of forests in Manistee, and a lumber camp scene captioned "Camp 4 near Luther, Mich." Photographs from unidentified locations include views of a sawmill, flum, and lumber camp, several home interiors, mountains, and giant trees likely indicative of the West Coast. Two photographs also show a canoe with a Native American family on a lake in Northern Minnesota.

The Richard Whitworth papers contain letters and documents relating to explorers Robert Rogers and Jonathan Carver and several of their moneymaking ventures in North America, which Whitworth oversaw and encouraged.

The Richard Whitworth papers contain 32 documents, 7 letters, and 3 notes, bound by Richard Whitworth into an 80-page volume. The collection primarily concerns Jonathan Carver's and Richard Roberts' money-making ventures in North America, several of which they proposed while in England, and about which they consulted Whitworth during his tenure as a Member of Parliament.

The volume opens with four pages of accounts, written in an unknown hand and covering 1814-1815. They record transactions involving wheat, barley, peas, iron, and other items. Following this is a document entitled "An Account of the Situation, Trade and Number of Hunting Indians at Lake Pepin in the Mississippi, North America" (pp. 7-10), written by Carver to Whitworth in 1773. In it, Carver proposed the opening of a distillery near Lake Pepin (about 70 miles southeast of present-day Minneapolis) in order to sell rum and brandy to the local Native Americans, requiring an initial investment of £4000 and about 32 workers. He also described the activities and numbers of Native American hunters in the area, and gave a detailed description of the land, including terrain, trees, and opportunities for settlement by Europeans. The volume also contains two documents related to Carver's request to the King to grant him mining rights to large swaths of northeastern North America, in effect giving him a monopoly on precious metals produced in those areas. Included is a draft of his petition (p. 12), which gives the boundaries of the desired land and the specifics of the proposed agreement.

Other documents relate to the exploration for the Northwest Passage, and the attempts to secure payment for such an expedition, including one entitled "Memorandum for Mr. Whitworth," which proposed "rather an expedition by Water than otherwise," (p. 14); it provided many details of what Carver envisioned as a successful journey, including the types of men to hire, and supplies, pack animals, and weapons to bring. An additional document gives information on pay and the necessity of cooperation from the "Commanding Officers of Posts in the Interior part of the Country" (p. 22). Two printed copies of a petition from Rogers to the King (pp. 57-64), dated February 11, 1772, call the search for the Northwest Passage a "Great National Object," and claim that a small number of "Adventurers" could undertake such an endeavor for a "very moderate Sum." Also included is a document signed by Rogers, listing three pages of "Necessaries" for such an expedition (pp. 46-48), and a list of American tree seeds (p. 51).

Another highlight of the collection is a 1775 copy of a "land deed" fabricated by Carver, which he claimed documented a transfer of territory to him from the Naudowessie Indians in 1767. Oddly, the land purportedly granted, located in Wisconsin, belonged not to the Naudowessie, but rather to their enemies, the Ojibwe (Chippewa). The document includes the falsified pictographic signatures of "Hawnopawjatin" (turtle) and "Ottotongomlishea" (snake).