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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Lehman, David Bontrager Horst

Contributors dc:contributor

• Morrissey, Robert M
• Hoxie, Frederick E.
• Hoganson, Kristin L
• Edmunds, Russel D

• Potawatomi
• Soil
• History
• Native American
• American Indian
• Local History
• Historical Geography
• Surveyor
• Land Patent
• Indiana
• Illinois
• Michigan
• Wisconsin
• Lake Michigan
• Watershed

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 David Lehman

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121366