A Note on Historical Conversations and Concepts

Every project has more than a single origin story. This one has several, all shaped by a number of influences stemming from my experience as a resident of Michigan and professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for nearly fifteen years. Teaching a capstone senior seminar for the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies on representations of slavery that included an Underground Railroad tour presented by the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County led me to discover, along with my students, the rich local history of southeastern Michigan abolitionism. It was delving further into this local history in an investigation of Adrian, Michigan, abolitionist Laura Smith Haviland that led me to review Michigan’s 1855 personal liberty law. This protection for Michigan residents who were runaways from the slave states undermined the national Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Reading it set me on a quest to find earlier laws, opening my eyes to loopholes in the Northwest Ordinance that left legal room for slavery and indentured servitude to exist in Michigan. Intrigued and also disappointed by this latter fact that was at odds with my own ideas about the state, I wanted to pursue the subject focusing on Detroit, where Michigan’s practice of slavery was the most concentrated. Serendipitously, an interdisciplinary group of faculty members and graduate students at the University of Michigan began meeting to jointly explore the notion of introducing a new field of scholarly enquiry called the Detroit School of Urban Studies, in line with the Chicago and LA schools coined in previous decades. Our Department of Afroamerican and African Studies was centrally involved in this activity along with faculty in Social Work, Sociology, Urban Planning, and the Residential College, so I sat in on these discussions with urban planners, sociologists of the city, and twentieth-century urban historians, which heightened and sharpened my interest in Detroit. Although my peers were discussing postindustrial society, food deserts, green spaces, mass incarceration, and the pitfalls of gentrification, I could see links between this modern (and postmodern) Detroit and the Detroit of the colonial and early American eras when slavery was practiced. I began to visit Detroit museums and historic sites in southeastern Michigan to try to feel the outlines of a story I might tell even as my imagination was captured by a quotation by a colleague involved in the Detroit School discussions, the historian Charles Bright, who had written the following about Detroit history in an article in the Journal of American History:

           The dominant historical discourse [on Detroit] is one of rise and fall, spiked by an immense nostalgia for the city that once (briefly) was. The recent past is often deployed as a cautionary tale about what goes wrong with urban spaces when racism, white flight, and industrial evacuation undercut a city’s viability. Such a historical construction places Detroit in a past that is now lost and irretrievable and leaves current residents . . . dangling at the end of history with little hope and no agency.¹

Bright’s passage prompted a number of questions for me. Was Detroit’s history really lost and irretrievable? What did it mean to be “dangling at the end of history”? And what kind of historical evidence or narrative would provide the impetus for those dangling on the end to pull themselves back up, into a fuller knowledge of history, community, place, and power relations? It so happened that my considering of these questions coincided temporally with the War of 1812 bicentennial and the Civil War sesquicentennial. There were a number of related events taking place in the Detroit area, and what I observed at the ones I attended indicated to me that the historical thread about slavery and Detroit that the public wanted to hold on to was a story of Detroit’s role in the Underground Railroad. I sat in on sessions in which speakers extolled the bravery of their UGRR conductor ancestors and freedom-seeker ancestors, and sessions in which performers dramatically reenacted the feats of locally famous Michigan abolitionists. I also visited a new exhibit unveiled at the Detroit Historical Museum that celebrated the valiant organizers of the Detroit Underground and proclaimed the Northwest Territory to be a free space dating back to its founding in 1787. All of this interest in local history was exciting and even contagious, but there was something missing. Detroit was not only a place that fostered freedom bids as part of the Underground Railroad; it was also a place that fostered slavery throughout the second half of its colonial history and well into the American period. I wanted, then, to explore and share the stories of those who were enslaved in Detroit and to trace the form of slavery that took shape in a northern interior locale with a significant Native American presence. I wanted to understand how slavery and race intersected in early Detroit, how conditions of bondage and the extraction of unpaid labor intersected with gender roles and women’s experiences, how enslaved people undermined their condition of unfreedom, and whether remnants of Detroit’s history of slavery still existed in the city’s landscape.

After beginning research on this project in the spring of 2011, I was stunned to learn just how few scholarly works had been written on the subject of slavery in Detroit. The sum total of dedicated secondary source materials that I uncovered with the help of my talented student research assistants consisted of a 1938 master’s thesis completed by Therese Kneip at the University of Detroit, a 1970 article titled “Black Slavery in Michigan” published by David Katzman in the journal American Studies, a chapter on “Black Slavery in Detroit” by Jorge Castellanos in the 1981 edited book Detroit Perspectives, and an article titled “The Fluid Frontier” published by Afua Cooper in the Canadian Review of American Studies in 2000. Cooper’s work in particular emphasized the importance of both natural and political borders along the Detroit River and put forward the notion of “the border as a significant unit of analysis” for Canadian-American transnational black history. “One discovers,” Cooper asserted about the border, “that Blacks who lived at its edges consciously manipulated it in their ‘search for place.’” Cooper’s insights about the material and metaphorical role of the border have influenced multiple studies, including my own. But in the year 2000, Afua Cooper’s approach was rare; few other works were picking up on the important themes and questions she presented, especially on the U.S. side of the border.²

More than a decade later, in 2012, Detroit journalist Bill McGraw released a well-researched newspaper story provocatively titled “Slavery Is Detroit’s Big, Bad Secret.” I had begun my research just a year earlier and wondered if McGraw had been drawn toward this topic, as I had been, by the groundswell of local talk about the Underground Railroad in Detroit’s history during public events marking anniversaries of the Civil War and the War of 1812. Two of these gatherings took place at the Detroit Historical Museum and were the result of a long-term collaboration between scholars based at the museum and at Wayne State University. The historians Denver Brunsman and Joel Stone were central to these endeavors and published edited books in 2009 and 2012 featuring the work of graduate students and linked to museum-based symposia. These detailed edited collections on Detroit during the Revolutionary Era and War of 1812 years touched on the dynamics of slavery and contributed to the small body of existing literature. In addition, David Lee Poremba’s scrupulously annotated chronology of Detroit completed for the city’s tercentennial in 2001 includes a wealth of detail about key events that contributes to the reconstruction of the context in which slavery unfolded.³ In fact, the three hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding was an important moment that inspired the production of a wider range of Detroit histories and chronicles than had been published since the early and mid-1900s; most of these anniversary works were geared toward popular audiences and fostered an energetic local public awareness of Detroit’s long and fascinating history.

During the early stages of my research, I found, as well, that scholarship on African American history in Detroit during the colonial and early national periods was nearly as slim as the literature on slavery in the city. A University of Michigan doctoral dissertation and later articles by Norman McRae on “Blacks in Detroit” (1982), as well as books by David Katzman (1975) and Reginald Larrie (1981), included chapters on the pre-nineteenth-century era of black history in the city. Isabella Swan and Mark McPherson, both local Michigan historians, had written brief (in the case of Swan) and exploratory (in the case of McPherson) biographies of Elizabeth Denison Forth that were essential to this subject matter; both included crucial primary source transcriptions at the end of their books. But overall, as the colonial historian Christian Crouch has concurred in her nuanced papers on Detroit as “the Black City,” it was as though blacks were imagined as having just appeared on the Detroit scene during the Great Migration of African Americans from the South and were associated only with Motor City manufacturing, the Motown musical sound, and mid-twentieth-century peaks of social unrest, otherwise known as the riots of 1943 and 1967.⁴ While I was in the midst of developing this project, a pivotal edited collection, years in the making, was released by Wayne State University Press. That book, A Fluid Frontier, edited by Canadian historian Karolyn Smardz Frost and American literary scholar Veta Smith Tucker, focused on the valiant history of the Underground Railroad in Detroit but also wrestled with the unpleasant fact of slaveholding in the Detroit River region, particularly in the introduction and a chapter focused on the Denison family. In 2011, the Canadian historian Gregory Wigmore published his article “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland” in a Journal of American History special issue on borderlands. A significant piece heralding and indeed modeling a broader discussion that recognizes the northern border as equal in historical importance and social texture as the southern border (with Mexico), Wigmore’s work, like earlier publications by McRae and Cooper, emphasized the role of the Detroit River as a permeable border that enslaved people crossed in dual directions. Wigmore skillfully used the theme of river traffic to indicate a pre-history of slave escapes “before the [underground] railroad” as well as a broader context of international political machinations. There is, perhaps, a subtle sticking point between historians such as Wigmore and interdisciplinary scholars such as Veta Tucker over how to carbon-date the activities of the Underground Railroad. Tucker suggests in her opening chapter to A Fluid Frontier that every escape in the region can be counted within Underground Railroad history, while Wigmore sets up a strict before-after structure in the language of his piece.⁵ It should be noted that the National Park Service’s essential and admirable Network to Freedom program also takes a liberal view when determining what to count within the Underground Railroad framework and when to start counting. The historian Manisha Sinha, in her recent sweeping interracial study of the transnational abolition movement, asserts that the history of abolition begins when the first person resisted slavery. This argument is resoundingly convincing; however, the history of abolition (the multifaceted struggle to end enslavement across the Atlantic world) and the history of the Underground Railroad or Railway (organized networks of activists committed to aiding enslaved people’s passage to freedom in the United States and Canada) do not fully overlap. On this question, I lean toward the view implicitly advanced by scholars Eric Foner and Stephen Kantrowitz, who describe the concerted organization of antislavery networks as a marker of the formation of the movement in the late 1820s and 1830s. It is relevant, though, as well as revealing for Underground Railroad scholarship, that research on Detroit indicates the existence of such networks in the very early 1800s in references to connected individuals who encouraged escapes as well as to the presence of Negro Town as a base camp for resisters.⁶

Alongside the small but now steadily growing number of publications on slavery and early black history in Detroit, there have been several dissertations, manuscripts in progress, and new books produced by a generation of historical thinkers who are exposing the economic importance, political ambiguity, and cultural complexity of Detroit as a place situated betwixt and between colonial France and Great Britain, Great Britain and the United States, and multiple indigenous nations. In 2001, map historian and curator Brian Leigh Dunnigan released an extensive cartographical study, Frontier Metropolis, which reproduced and contextualized maps and images to reconstruct the city’s past and serves as a major reference guide for current studies. Dunnigan’s interpretation emphasized the international and urban character of this remote frontier settlement across one and a half centuries. Catherine Cangany’s Frontier Seaport (2014), in implicit conversation with Dunnigan’s interpretive graphic collection, emphasizes Detroit’s port town character. Cangany’s is the first in a series of full-length New Detroit History monographs that seek to move historical literature on the city beyond the scholarship of early twentieth-century antiquarian historians and political historians such as Silas Farmer and Clarence Burton, whose chief interests were in collecting data about the city in order to champion its progress in a rising industrial age.⁷ Cangany brings an enlightening Atlantic studies perspective to her analysis of early American Detroit, which she describes as a maritime trading town with economic and cultural ties to urban centers on the East Coast as well as in Europe. Cangany’s focus on economic exchange and local politics leads her to notice the presence of enslaved people. Forthcoming histories by Karen Marrero, Andrew Sturtevant, and Kyle Mays will frame Detroit as an explicitly indigenous location where Native American and mixed-race Indian people lived in a nuanced set of relations with European and American settlers and, to a certain extent, African Americans. What I hope this book, The Dawn of Detroit, adds to the mix is an explicit and concentrated focus on enslaved people’s lives that necessitates seeing African American and Native American history in Detroit as interrelated rather than separate streams of experience.

My work joins with all of these aforementioned texts, and surely others, in the collaborative intellectual project of picturing early Detroit in a way that draws on the conceptual revelations of ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and studies of the Atlantic world, the movement of trade and capital, and the intermingling of cultures. Somehow, as the reading public has internalized narratives about American national and regional pasts, we have forgotten that Detroit is ancient, that Detroit is indigenous, and that Detroit has a long-standing black presence. We have misplaced the knowledge that most of the Midwest was French, and we attribute anything fascinating in Francophone-American history to New Orleans, or maybe to St. Louis. We have never deeply considered the impact of the reality that slavery existed even in the Midwest and, as Afua Cooper so boldly stated it nearly two decades ago, in Canada where a “mythology” of a black “haven” holds sway.⁸ Scholars, while aware of these nuances, have only begun to probe them and to actively present them for public consideration. In our current transnational world where all entrenched human dilemmas are simultaneously local and global, a renewal of studies of Detroit and the U.S.-Canadian borderlands helps return us to a sense of the critical importance of the Great Lakes region to North American histories of extractive and settler colonialism, slavery, racial formation, cultural complexity, and the refusal of subjugated peoples to readily submit to domination.⁹

Remembering the Black Militia

In the small number of studies that assess slavery in Detroit, or early black history in the city, the story of the black militia often rises to the fore. This book has been no exception, for that saga holds within it an explanatory power that captures the unstable racial dynamics produced by Detroit’s borderland character. Today Detroit’s black militia is commemorated on a plaque in the Detroit Historical Museum that details the biography of its leader, Peter Denison, as well as in literature produced by Ranger Shawna Mazur of the River Raisin National Battlefield in Monroe (the present-day location of French Town) and through historical reenactment at the Battlefield.¹⁰ These are necessary and enlightening interventions into local histories and memories that all too often overlook African American contributions to the state’s early past. But even as we remember the historic occurrence of black men forming and leading an American military unit at the dawn of the nineteenth century, we must take care to recall and question the reasons why this special unit was authorized by Michigan authorities in the first place. William Hull imagined the black militia as a defensive force, positioned to fight primarily against Native Americans on whose lands Michigan Territory was located. Black men’s seeming willingness to protect the United States raised their esteem in the view of some territorial officials and potentially set them at odds with indigenous people.

In addition to coming away with a lopsided interpretation that valorizes black agency and leaves in place a notion of Native Americans as enemies of the state, it is easy to part historical tracks at this juncture of the story of the black militia, to see Native American history moving in one direction that positions Indian people outside the United States, while seeing African American history moving in an opposing direction that positions black people as (co-opted) insiders. But the picture of what life looked like in early Detroit—what survival for subjugated groups looked like—was never so clearly divided along these kinds of racial lines. People of indigenous and African descent were enslaved both in that town and along each bank of the river. They ran away together, as in the case of Jenney (a mixed-race black woman) and Joseph Quinn (a young Native man) in 1807. They formed families together, as in the case of Abraham and Marie Louise Ford, an enslaved black man and his free Ojibwe-French wife, whose daughter was born in the midst of war in 1813. African Americans and Native Americans may even have been members of the black militia together, given the nature of slavery in the region, the tendency for Afro-Native people to be defined as “negro” in historical records, and the unit’s makeup of runaway slaves from Canada. Of course, in addition to forming close connections, Native Americans and African Americans also faced off, across domestic spaces in which one was the owner, the other owned, and across lines of battle in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. One thing these populations always shared with one another, as well as with settlers of the young American nation that sought but failed to define as well as confine them, was a fierce love of the dignity and autonomy embedded in the principle of freedom.

Borderlands and Frontiers

I have never quite imagined myself as a borderlands scholar, but as a place that birthed surprising events shaped by its location on multiple lines of differentiation and difference, Detroit compels its students to think in these expansive interpretive terms. In framing the parameters of this book in the introduction, I describe Detroit as a “frontier-borderland” environment. With the use of this language, I am calling on at least two streams of historical study: Native American histories of the Great Lakes and Middle West and African American histories of slavery. Histories of the Great Lakes, particularly those that focus on Native people in the region, engage with the notion of borderlands as spaces of cultural encounter.¹¹ The classic example of this scholarship is Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, which captured the multilayered complexities of cross-cultural accommodation. White’s concept of a “middle ground,” defined as a “place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages,” was an arena where indigenous peoples and Europeans encountered and negotiated with one another by necessity.¹² He argued that a social and political middle ground, a “mutually intelligible world,” formed through a series of misunderstandings between Indians and Europeans who were struggling to compromise through the end of the War of 1812. White’s interpretation of inter-group dynamics in the Great Lakes influenced numerous studies to follow, some of which critiqued his argument, all of which built on his work.¹³ While I appreciate White’s concept, I am inspired by the notion of “the Coast of the Strait” (described in the introduction of this book) to perceive these social relations differently.

Rather than seeing a ground that various historical actors traversed to eventually meet in the middle in a place like Detroit, a metaphor that suggests terra firma beneath all of the historical actors’ feet, I imagine Detroiters moving across more than one type of surface as they warily encountered one another: water as well as land. If free Europeans can be said to occupy one kind of cultural ground, and free Native Americans can be said to occupy an alternative kind of cultural ground, where do we place people who fit into neither of these categories? Where do we locate the enslaved? I will suggest that the unfree occupy a precarious position more akin to a shoreline, with one foot on water, the other on land. Located on an unpredictable metaphorical coast where the water and land converged, enslaved people encountered free people of various ethnic backgrounds from a differential position of insecurity. Instead of the “middle ground,” a Midwestern landscape peopled by those who were free, we can imagine a coastline dominating early Detroit. This coast was a waterscape in the Great Lakes interior where enslaved people—Native Americans as well as Afro-Americans—strove to negotiate from a groundless position of material and legal instability.¹⁴

I suppose I differ from many other historians of Native America in the social groups that I hold in view as I scan the Midwestern terrain. I want to insist on the visibility of an overlooked world—a black and indigenous world of bondspeople—shaped by their daily strategies of survival as well as the cultural heritages of their various homelands. This world of the unfree that surely formed in servant’s quarters of merchant homes, in farm fields and fur trade shops, on riverbanks and riverboats, was not devised strictly along the lines of race, clan, or tribe; it was a shared social space of the struggling subjugated.¹⁵ With great care, colonial and early Americanists who study the Midwest are beginning to map this world. Jennifer Stinson offers a moving and analytically penetrating study of lead mining districts in Wisconsin and Illinois in the 1820s and 1830s that connects black slavery with Native land dispossession and an expanding culture of white masculinity and gentility that was supported by both. Christian Crouch is tracing the history of black Detroit through successive imperial regimes and analyzing black men’s adaptations of indigenous terrain and strategies in the Midwest and Northeast. And in his forthcoming second study of indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes, Michael Witgen is endeavoring to formulate a capacious and exacting theoretical frame that historicizes the racialization of Indians in the age of U.S. expansion and interprets what he calls the “political economy of plunder” that links black and Native trajectories.¹⁶

In addition to charting complex cultural and political relations between European colonies and indigenous communities, historians of Native America have wrestled with connotations of the term “frontier,” rightly contesting the customary meaning of the word derived from historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1894 thesis of westward expansion.¹⁷ In Turner’s work and in American culture more generally, the word “frontier” has long suggested a line of difference between advancing white “civilization” and Native American “savagery,” where cross-cultural confrontation ultimately gives way to the perfection of the American character and expansion of the colonial enterprise captured by the idea of “manifest destiny.” However, in studies of the history of slavery, particularly work by Ira Berlin, frontier locations have been described as places on the edge of slavery’s westward movement.¹⁸ These are locations where populations were relatively sparse, where lands were not fully settled by whites, and where practices of plantation slavery had not yet been systematized and fixed into social and legal practice. As legal historian Lea VanderVelde has so clearly described it: “Frontier slaves were sought for the needs of westward expansion,” as “lands were available for settlement in great supply, but labor could not be hired.” Because of the need for slave-owners to rely on their bondspeople differently in these rugged locations, frontier environments often left greater room for slaves to negotiate their relationships with masters. The frontier farm in 1820s Missouri, for instance, is a spot where one might expect to see an enslaved man clearing a field alongside his owner. Detroit was just such a place, and hence I have retained the language of “frontier” throughout this book, though with a degree of restraint.¹⁹

Some historians of Native America and the West also see a utility in the use of the contested term “frontier.” William Cronon employs this word sparingly in his environmental history of Chicago because of its ability to convey a macro-level historical relationship between cities and rural areas understood as frontiers in the nineteenth century.²⁰ In his article on ethnic mixing in the Missouri River region titled “More Motley Than Mackinaw,” John Mack Faragher employs the notions of “frontiers of inclusion” and “frontiers of exclusion.”²¹ He argues that prior to the surge in Anglo-American population numbers and prior to Missouri statehood in 1821, French and Native American residents lived and worked together there, cooperating across lines of difference. With an increased American presence came greater racial differentiation and less political support for Indian land claims. Faragher sees the texture of frontier relations as shifting over time and degrading with an increased Anglo-American influence. While Faragher’s emphasis is on change over time, I see an application for his analysis across time as well as across social spaces in the locale of Detroit. Similarly to what transpired in Missouri, free Native people saw their standing in Detroit decline with the diminishment of French power and the imposition of British and then American authority. For free indigenous people, Detroit moved from being something like a “frontier of inclusion” in the French period to becoming a “frontier of exclusion” in the British and American periods. But at the same time, there were always frontiers of inclusion and exclusion operating simultaneously in Detroit. While free Indians were included in French community and social life in noteworthy ways, unfree Indians—Native bondspeople—were excluded. The notion of frontiers of inclusion and exclusion, when viewed in place as well as across time, helps to illuminate social relations in Detroit in a way that keeps the presence of enslaved people of color visible.

Seeing early Detroit through a lens that includes Native Americans and African Americans within the same frame, together with their Euro-American captors and, at times, collaborators, highlights a related set of open and difficult questions that scholars are beginning to fruitfully engage. How can we further explore and understand the attitudes and activities of Native American slaveholders in the North? Did they have practices in common with familiar groups (Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles) that are categorized as the slaveholding tribes of the Southeast and Indian Territory? How did varieties of indigenous political organization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shape slave trading and slaveholding practices in the North as compared to the South, in the woodlands as compared to the plains, and so on? How did earlier patterns of indigenous captive taking and slave labor usage (for instance, in the Fort Ancient and Mississippian archaeological periods and into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) affect later practices of slavery in Native communities? What do we do with the knowledge that so many Native women were first held captive by indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes? How do issues of gender, enslavement, and the racialization of Indians as “Panis” complicate notions of indigenous alliance, negotiation, and as it has lately been termed, “mastery” in interior Great Lakes areas where indigenous groups retained staying power well into the late nineteenth century? Does the language of “mastery” (meant to indicate prowess in imperial dynamics in a way that restores Native groups to a place of rightful recognition in international affairs) take on different connotations when we recognize that some of these “masters” actually possessed human beings as slaves?²²

And in what might be deemed a flip side of the tarnished coin of colonial influences, we must continue to ask the critical question of how we should understand the role of people of African descent within analyses of colonialism in Native American studies and African diaspora studies. Should black people be considered “settlers,” a rhetorical move that groups them together with the Europeans who sometimes enslaved them but that also recognizes how black communities do indeed benefit from the dispossession of indigenous lands? The U.S. slavery historian Max Grivno offers a sharp take on this question, noting that in the “Northwest Frontier,” blacks found a “liberating potential” due to a number of factors, including a diverse population, slavery’s “unimportant role” in local economies, legal challenges to slavery like the Northwest Ordinance, and a high need for labor that increased laborers’ bargaining potential. In this context, Grivno argues, “the frontiers’ free black[s] and slaves were often most comfortable with white settlers, with whom they shared a language and a similar cultural heritage.” While my study of enslaved people in Detroit has led me to see this site in a contrasting way that leans toward commonalities between blacks and Native Americans, I would not deny the fitness of Grivno’s argument, especially in places farther west, such as Minnesota, where Euro-American labor and social systems developed later than in Detroit. Canadian indigenous studies scholars Zainab Amadahy and Bonita Lawrence have wrestled with the question of black settlement in material as well as ethical terms, landing uncomfortably on a notion of “ambiguous settlers” to account for black people’s “desperate need to survive after slavery” while acknowledging that black writers on both sides of the border often fail to acknowledge Native land loss. “Black struggles for freedom,” the co-authors assert, “have required (and continue to require) ongoing colonization of Indigenous land.” In the United States, Native American studies scholars are also starting to think through the ways in which African American relationships to settler colonialism were similar to or distinct from those of Euro-Americans. Jodi Byrd, a Chickasaw literary scholar and colonial studies theorist who has acknowledged her own tribal nation’s role in holding black bondspeople, determined that a separate word, “arrivants,” is needed to capture the difference between black dwellers and white “settlers” on Native lands.²³ In the domain of western history, public historian Crystal Alegria and Métis/Cree/Ojibwe doctoral student Jill Mackin are working with the term “refugee” in their development of a narrative that describes the experience of Lizzie Williams, a black woman who moved from Kentucky to Montana out of “desperation” following the Civil War. They seized on this language in rejection of the more common term “pioneer” and in the understanding that “refugee” conveys: “one that flees; especially: a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution.”²⁴

The aspirational language of “ambiguous settlers,” “arrivants,” and “refugees” strives for a fair and sensitive means of articulating the compromises and complicities of various populations in a painful past. But, as Amadahy and Lawrence suggest, there is perhaps one space in the American-Canadian borderlands in which a radical alterity to colonial and racialized complicity existed: Native communities that accepted blacks via the Underground Railway (or “Railroad” in U.S. parlance). Putting forward Tuscarora “guides” as their primary example (but alas, offering no citation), Amadahy and Lawrence point to those who “risked their lives at a time when Indigenous people could have been enslaved, killed, or dispossessed of their land for helping runaways.”²⁵

And so it seems we have come full circle. I took up this book project in part because I saw the public commemorations of Underground Railroad history in Detroit as too simplistic and celebratory, as too evacuative of an earlier and more ornery past complicit with racial slavery, but I also concede at this parting moment that the Underground Railroad motif does have the potential to do productive cultural work. The cognitive leap required to see that any operations of the famed Underground Railroad had to take place on current or former indigenous lands compels a respect for first peoples, their land holdings, and their political systems, even within a framework of feel-good popular mythology that obscures the wrongs of the United States, Canada, and the citizens of these nations. If scholars and writers can commit to the serious archival and intellectual project that must accompany such a leap, we can perhaps make progress in urging the publics of which we are part to challenge the intersecting systems and ongoing imprints of slavery and colonialism. The Great Lakes, as the historian Heidi Bohaker has so beautifully put it, was a place of “spiritually charged waterscapes,” for humans as well as other-than-human beings. Perhaps here, in this ancient land of glassy waters, anything was, and still is, possible.²⁶