University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Keeping fires, tending lands: The practices and legacy of Potawatomi farming around Lake Michigan, 1700-1900

Lehman, David Bontrager Horst

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121366

Description

Title
Keeping fires, tending lands: The practices and legacy of Potawatomi farming around Lake Michigan, 1700-1900
Author(s)
Lehman, David Bontrager Horst
Issue Date
2023-07-13
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Morrissey, Robert M
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Hoxie, Frederick E.
Committee Member(s)
  • Hoganson, Kristin L
  • Edmunds, Russel D
Department of Study
History
Discipline
History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Potawatomi
  • Soil
  • History
  • Native American
  • American Indian
  • Local History
  • Historical Geography
  • Surveyor
  • Land Patent
  • Indiana
  • Illinois
  • Michigan
  • Wisconsin
  • Lake Michigan
  • Watershed
Abstract
Works of history that focus on the Potawatomi nation and U.S. settler invasions, even when written “from below” have previously focused on the political and cultural dynamics of conflict over land. This project approaches the same historical topic “from the ground up,” focusing on the material object of contests between Native and invading peoples: the soil. This work uses soil analysis, written accounts of Potawatomi land use, and GIS mapping of settler invasion to study geographic patterns of the significant overlap in Native and settler land interests in the early 19th century. Potawatomi management of local fire regimes maintained the ecological borders of prairie-forest mosaic across Potawatomi homelands, impacting soil formation. The spatial pattern of invasion shows that aspiring settler landowners targeted Potawatomi-crafted farmland before other soils, and naming Potawatomi land management as farming exposes both historical and scientific works that fail to recognize how indigenous peoples shape their homelands’ soils and ecologies to begin the work of reversing such erasure by foregrounding the active aspects of Native presence and persistence and putting Potawatomi people at the center of an account of Potawatomi homelands over time.
Graduation Semester
2023-08
Type of Resource
Thesis
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2023 David Lehman

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