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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.

Collection of research materials on Michigan topics, mostly photocopies, notes, drafts of articles, and correspondence.

The collection consists mostly of photocopies of newspaper articles, magazine articles, information from websites, the Congressional Record, and chapters from reference and other books, on topics of interest to Barnett. Also included are his correspondence and email to various institutions and people asking for information and material, his notes, and typed articles he wrote on various topics. Topics documented in depth include: Ash, Center Line, John Farmer, Upper Peninsula railroads, Magnet Truck, Michigan railroads, the Mackinac Bridge, music and singers who sang songs about Michigan and or cars, the longstanding oleo versus margarine debates and laws, Michigan Central Railroad Co. Head Lights (a publication), Michigan jazz, traffic lights, with biographical materials on W.L. Potts, and Detroit, Mackinac and Marquette Railroad Co. maps (oversized transparencies). The materials (photocopies)on Headlights or Headlight Flashes includes: an advertising publication of the Company, which describes the comfort of traveling via the Company's trains and provides city histories with biographies of important families and individuals, as well as photographs of those people, expensive homes, businesses, public buildings, and pastoral scenes. Towns described include: Michigan City (Ind.), 1894; and the Mich. cities of: Albion, 1895; Pontiac, 1897; Benton Harbor and Flint, 1896; and Saint Joseph, 1898. Also included are microfilmed newspaper articles (photocopies), in which the Headlights of various cities were advertised, 1895-1896 and 1941, and 1997-2000 typed transcripts of other similar newspaper advertisements, 1895-1898. Additional subjects include: Agricultural Demonstration Trains of Michigan State University, 1906-1937; buying Michigan, 1795-1796; counties, name changes/considered creation of new counties; the history of county names; dandelions [as an emergency source of post-World War II rubber]; highway lighthouses [precursors to traffic lights]; lynchings; prisoners building Michigan roads during the 1920s; reflectors (roadside); roadside parks [Michigan had the first]; stagecoaches; broadcasting; homestead lands; Hollywood; the Port Huron and Milwaukee Railroad; Sabbath blue laws; Ludington (Mich.); swamp lands; centroids; Iron Range and Huron Bay Rialroad; ferries; population centers; Oldsmar, Florida; David Ward, Deward (Mich.); the Detroit and Charlevoix Railroad Company; Cigar Industry in Detroit, including strikes, unions, and women employees; Cigar Store Indians; crops of Flax and Gingseng and flax industries in Michigan prisons; Michigan Indians mentioned in county histories; Michigan Road Construction Train; Michigan World War I fruit and olive pit gathering campaign to create gas masks; Ragweed and hay fever and the Northern Hay Fever Resort Association, Topinabee, and the Western Hay Fever Association of the U.S., headquartered in Petoskey; General Philip H. Sheridan 's warhorse Rienzi; St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal Company and its subsidiary units, the Canal Mineral Land Company and the Michigan Pine Land Association; and Windmills in Detroit. Also included is a draft of a book by Graydon M. Meints on lumber baron David Ward that Barnett reviewed. The major topics found in 2021 Addition, Boxes 63-75, include: American Tract Society, Bloomers, Colporteur, Graphite Mining in Michigan, Medical Quacks, Michigan Iron and Land Company, Samuel Geil Maps of Michigan, and Whipping (Military corporal punishment). The 2022 Addition, Boxes 76-79, includes the major topics of Vigilance Committees against German Americans during World War I and Ski Trains. Other topics include: Buffalo Bill Train Accident, Carbon Works in Detroit, Detroit’s Streetlight Towers, Grand Duke Alexis A Romanov Visits Detroit, ‘Hello Girls’ [U.S. Army Signal Corps, World War I], Lindbergh in Michigan, Michigan World War II Veterans Bonus, Wetzel (Antrim County, MI, village), Bomb Mackinaw (which were 1925 practice maneuver plans to prevent enemies from crossing into the straits by dropping bombs from airplanes), and Crawfish. The collection is ongoing.

Processing Note: Abbreviations used by Barnett on folder labels were used and copied by Clarke processors exactly. Acidic materials were copied in 2014.