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NATIVE BUT FOREIGN
Brenden W. Rensink
Foreword by Sterling Evans
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Foreword, by Sterling Evans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Introduction. Comparing the US-Canadian and US-Mexican
Borderlands and the Transnational Natives Who Crossed Them . . . . . . . 7
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Illustrations
Figures
Figure 1.1. Key locations in nineteenth-century Cree
and Chippewa borderlands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Figure 1.2. Northwestern Mexico mining sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Figure 2.1. Waterways Across the Montana-Alberta border. . . . . . . . . . . 45
Figure 3.1. Yaqui River Valley and encroaching
development, Sonora, Mexico, 1910 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Figure 4.1. Important locations in Montana Cree
and Chippewa history, 1880–1916. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Figure 6.1. Yaqui passage routes and Arizona settlements. . . . . . . . . . . 121
Figure 6.2. Southern Arizona railroads and major
mountain ranges in 1877. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Figure 6.3. Tucson area Yaqui settlements, 1900–1970. . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Figure 6.4. Salt River Valley Yaqui settlements, 1898–present . . . . . . . 131
Figure 6.5. Scottsdale Yaqui settlements, 1920–present. . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Figure 8.1. 1901 Anaconda Standard cartoons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Tables
Table 1. Arizona Yaqui settlements, 1900–present. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Table 2. Passage dates of Mexican-born Yaquis registered
in Arizona in 1940 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Foreword
Brenden Rensink’s Native but Foreign is proudly number nine in the Con-
necting the Greater West Series, and readers will see instantly how it is a
perfect fit. This book connects and compares both the US-Mexican and
US-Canadian borders and their histories of indigenous peoples negotiating
the boundaries, creating new borderlands spaces in a changing American
West. There is a growing historical literature that deals with both of these
North American borderlands (including several other books that appear in
this series), and Native but Foreign will be one of the important works in
that particular category.
Meeting here are the Cree and Chippewa peoples from Alberta who
move south into Montana, and the Yaqui Indians from Sonora who migrate
north and form a new homeland in Arizona. Rensink explores, analyzes,
and compares their distinctive backgrounds, histories, journeys, and efforts
to seek federal tribal recognition from the United States government.
There is no similar comparative study of Native peoples in the West who
migrated from neighboring nation states, which makes this book a much
needed contribution to the literature on North American borderlands,
Native American/First Nations history, and comparative and transnational
history.
To accomplish this feat, Rensink implemented a multi-archival attack
to track the stories of these transboundary Indians who became native
but foreign in a new country for them. He relied on national archives in
Canada and the United States along with a variety of state and provincial
archives as well as private collections to provide the sources and voices
he needed to weave these comparative stories together. And Rensink tells
them here in a compelling way that will be useful and essential for both
classrooms and seminars as well as for a public readership interested in
anything Native in the greater North American West.
And in these ways then, we welcome this new book to the series. Con-
necting the Greater West is an ongoing series of scholarly works (mono-
graphs and edited volumes) that explores the changing and growing ways
xii Foreword
that historians and other scholars are coming to view the North American
West. This greater region includes a large region stretching from western
Canada and the North American side of the Pacific Rim to the American
West and northern Mexico, with all the borderlands and connections be-
tween them. Subjects of these books range from borderlands and transna-
tional histories, environmental and agricultural histories, gender and social
histories, immigration and indigenous negotiations of bordered regions. It
is to these last two areas that Native but Foreign especially applies, recount-
ing the multidimensional stories of Cree, Chippewa, and Yaqui peoples
and their quest for a better life across political boundaries into the western
United States. Their histories are yet another way in which we can come
to a better understanding of the history of a greater, very transnational, and
transcultural West.
Sterling Evans
Series Editor
Acknowledgments
This book began a decade ago as my doctoral thesis, and many people
aided its production. With such a passage of time, I will surely fail to thank
everyone who has been involved, and I apologize to those I have over-
looked.
At the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), where this project be-
gan, I owe the professors I worked with—especially James Garza, Andrew
Graybill, Victoria Smith, Douglas Seefeldt, Alan Steinweis, David Wishart,
and John Wunder. As my MA and PhD adviser, Wunder modeled the
scholar and educator I hope to become. A dedicated scholar and advocate,
master editor, and devoted mentor to students like me, Wunder provides
an example I will strive to match for the remainder of my career. The sup-
port and friendship I received from fellow UNL graduate students like Rob
Voss, Shayla Swift, Dave Nesheim, Sam Herley, and Brent Rogers also
merit special mention. Thank you, dear friends. Scholars and friends from
other institutions have given continual support and expert counsel over the
past decade as well. I thank my recent research assistants Drew Rupard
and Addison Blair, and I am indebted to James Brooks, Elaine Carey, Mark
Ellis, Sterling Evans, Michel Hogue, Benjamin Johnson, Andrae Marak,
Sheila McManus, Eric Meeks, and Jeffrey Shepherd for helping me craft,
refine, and publish my scholarship. Countless others were kind enough to
respond to e-mail inquiries and provide other support, including Larry Burt,
Claudia Haake, Sally Hatfield, Matt Herman, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Leah
Glaser, David McCrady, David Miller, Celeste Rivers, Blair Stonechild,
Sam Truett, Paul Vanderwood, David Weber, and John Well-off-Man.
Friendly individuals at numerous institutions aided my research. In Mon-
tana the enthusiastic support of Ed Stamper and Gerard Vanderberg at Stone
Child College on the Rocky Boy Reservation gave me a much-needed boost
in confidence. Likewise, Nate and Voyd St. Pierre and the staff at Rocky
Boy School have my gratitude for helping me locate a somewhat forgotten
archival repository. In Arizona, Yaqui historian Ernesto Quiroga provided
xiv Acknowledgments
helped keep my family and me happy, safe, and sane through good times
and bad. Being continually surrounded by such wonderful people contin-
ues as one of the greatest blessings in my life.
I owe the most profound gratitude to my wife, Julianne. I doubt she
knew what she was getting into when she agreed to marry me—and two
weeks later to move across the country for graduate school. This period,
during which she worked to support our family (including two wonderful
children, Emilia and Peter), surely tried her patience with my scholarly
endeavors. Without her in my life, I doubt I would have finished gradu-
ate school, let alone this book. Thank you, Julianne, for sticking with me.
Thank you for your love and friendship. I will spend the rest of my life
repaying the debt I owe to you.
Finally, Emilia and Peter, you two are a source of joy (if occasional
frustration), and I hope that the current amazement you express with my
“writing a whole book” continues once you are able to read it.
To the many others who have encouraged me and aided my professional
and personal growth, I thank you too. Vă mulţumesc.
NATIVE BUT FOREIGN
Prologue
The most compelling histories are grounded in the personal and the in-
timate. Much of this book will examine human stories through a macro-
scopic lens, but I begin with two brief biographies of Indigenous people
who inhabited the US-Canadian and US-Mexican borderlands. Their nar-
ratives provide not only humanity but also a framework upon which to
build everything that will follow.
Grant Chief Stick, O-ki-mahw-mis-tik in Cree, was born in 1895 in Butte,
Montana. His family boasted a rich heritage, deeply rooted in the north-
ern Great Plains—by then cast as US-Canadian borderlands. Although his
grandmother was Blackfoot, the specter of a coyote haunted her childhood
dreams and prophesied that her children and grandchildren would be Cree.
Thus, when Crees captured and adopted her into their band, she did not
seek to escape. Rather, she intermarried, quickly acculturated, learned the
Cree language, and resolved to remain with her adopted tribe.1 In the years
preceding Chief Stick’s birth, his Cree and Blackfoot forbears inhabited a
broad region between what was becoming Montana, Alberta, and Saskatch-
ewan.2 They regularly traversed the line that Euro-Americans had drawn
across their homelands after the Treaty of 1818 between Great Britain and
the United States. Chief Stick’s family negotiated a dynamic cultural and
political geography that transcended boundaries, both tribal and interna-
tional. While Canadians and Americans may have viewed their presence as
transnational, they did not. “British,” “Canadian,” or “American” did not
define their self-identity: they were Crees.
By the time Chief Stick was born, borderland Crees in Montana tra-
versed precarious grounds. A decade earlier, Crees under the leadership of
Big Bear (Mistahimaskwa), Poundmaker, and others had participated in
Louis Riel’s failed 1885 North-West Rebellion in the District of Saskatch-
ewan, drawing the ire of non-Natives on both sides of the Forty-Ninth Par-
allel.3 In the following decade, many under the leadership of Chief Stick’s
stepfather, Little Bear or Imasees (Ayimâsis)—the son of Big Bear—fled
2 Prologue
good dances.”7 Resilient, they persisted, built some cabins, planted crops,
and hoped for permanent settlement. The maintenance of these sites in
1913–14 is a momentous marker in their history. Over the course of the
next two years, they secured federal tribal recognition and established a
reservation. A home was finally found amid the Bear Paw Mountains in
1916.
Chief Stick spent most of his remaining life on Rocky Boy’s Reserva-
tion, where he married Bad Looking Big Wind; both were enrolled mem-
bers. By the time he was interviewed in the mid-1970s, Chief Stick had
welcomed grandchildren into his family, but he had mourned the passing
of his first wife in 1945. They had been married for nearly thirty years.8
Chief Stick died on August 8, 1995, at the age of one hundred.9 His life,
like those of so many Native peoples who lived through these years, was
one of transition, beginning with nomadism and ending with reservation
settlement. As a “foreign” Indian in the United States, however, his story
proves unique.
Thirteen hundred miles south from Chief Stick’s birthplace in Butte is
the Yaqui River Valley in Sonora, Mexico. In 1871, a Yaqui Indian named
Lucas Chavez was born there in Tórim. Though far removed from the
white-Native conflicts that Grant Chief Stick’s Crees experienced along the
Forty-Ninth Parallel to the north, Chavez’s life in the US-Mexican border-
lands bears a remarkable resemblance to his northern plains counterpart.
Living in Tórim for his first fifteen years, Lucas Chavez was eyewitness
to some of the worst moments in a long history of Spanish and Mexican
warfare against the Yaquis.10 At the time of Chavez’s birth, Yaquis stood as
one of the last independent, unconquered Indigenous peoples in Mexico.
In the Yaqui River Valley and adjoining Bacatete Mountains, Yaquis had
resisted and repelled Spanish and Mexican government campaigns against
them for centuries. Although they had incorporated Christianity, they had
forged a fiercely unique sense of self and religiosity.11
Near the turn of the century, Porfirio Díaz’s regime instituted policies
to rid the region of Yaquis—extermination in Sonora or deportation and
enslavement on henequen and sisal plantations in the Yucatán and other
points south. It was against these terrible circumstances that the Yaqui
leader Cajeme and Lucas Chavez’s family fought in the 1880s. Chavez
later remembered it as a time of “continual disturbance.”12 Chavez saw his
three older brothers and more than one uncle killed. While besieged with
Cajeme at the Battle of Buatachive in the spring of 1886, Chavez’s parents
Prologue 5
The experiences Chavez related to Spicer spanned the first and second
of three discernable phases in Arizona Yaqui history: exodus from Sonora
and establishment of distinct Yaqui communities and cultural traditions in
the state. The third phase, securing legal landholdings and eventual fed-
eral tribal recognition and reservation lands, was yet to come. Chavez’s
experience was born in tragedy but propelled by adaptability and tenacity.
Chavez personified Yaqui resilience. His people fled to the United States as
fiercely independent, though pragmatic, transnational Natives. Their resis-
tance to Mexican rule had prompted their flight, but this did not preclude
them from operating within Mexican and US economic systems. Quite to
the contrary, they flourished in their chosen professions while establishing
Yaqui communities in Arizona, sustaining and expanding religious and
other cultural traditions, and negotiating the precarious borderlands be-
tween “American,” “Mexican,” and Indigenous identity and legal status.
The lives of Grant Chief Stick and Lucas Chavez emblematize the ex-
periences of countless other “foreign” Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis in the
United States. The circumstances of their struggles and triumphs, while
unique, can be extrapolated to many of their compatriots. Their words
recounting their harrowing experiences should stay in mind as we more
broadly explore the borderlands they negotiated. The intimate nature of
lived experience, the burden of persistent fear, sorrow, and uncertainty, the
relief of stability and refuge—these, sadly, are often absent from the his-
torical record. Too easily we view histories in the abstract, forgetting the
real people who lived them, people with joys and struggles. By examining
the lives of Chief Stick, Chavez, and others who will follow in this book,
we can imbue history with empathy. This empathy in turn can enlighten the
complex and all too often cruel past in which our own lives are based.
Introduction
Comparing the US-Canadian and US-Mexican
Borderlands and the Transnational Natives
Who Crossed Them
*****
*****
— Ja miksi?
— Kutsuakseni kokoon perhettä hartaushetkiin, joita olen
päättänyt pitää. Soitinkello tarvitaan sitä varten, koska olemme niin
hajalla. Sinä ehkä istut maalarimajassasi, äiti hommaa aitassa ja
ruokakammiossa, Margit ehkä laiskottelee laiturilla ja Svanten
Gunnar telmii vallatonna ullakoilla jossakin tai häiritsee pajoissa
seppäin työtä. Siis: Soitinkello on tarpeen.
— Minä näen sen. Ala, mies, työtäsi toisti maisteri Lauri, ja siihen
katosi kohta sipilla ja enkelit.
*****
*****
SOITTOKELLO.
*****
— Tervetultua, isä, hän sanoi. Minä olen nyt vihdoinkin tehnyt sen,
josta me keskenämme sovimme: olen toimittanut Maariankuvan ja
pirunkuvan pois päädyistä…
— Olemmeko siitä sopineet?
— Kyllä, etkö muista, että minä kohta kotiin tultuani sanoin että se
oli tehtävä? Etkä sinä väittänyt vastaan. Etten ennen asiaan ryhtynyt,
siihen oli syynä toivoni että sinä itsestäsi ymmärtäisit antaa siitä
käskyä; mutta nytpä en saattanut kauvemmin kestää. Kuules, isä,
jaksaako tuo hevoskaakki vielä todella sinua kantaa?
— Niinkuin näet.
*****