FOOTNOTES

*1 I use the term Indian throughout my writing, interchangeably with Native American. Indian is the term that my family and tribe most often use to refer to themselves. It is a familiar term throughout the world. Canadians use the term First Nations. I embrace the implications of the Canadian designation, but have concerns that most American readers would stumble over the name. Similarly, indigenous people is widely used, but lacks the geographic and historic specificity I seek to address.

*2 As a convenience to readers who are not Native American, I use the French name Montréal for unceded territory known to the Haudenosaunee as Tiohtiá:ke and to the Anishinaabeg as Mooniyang.

*3 Ceremonial tobacco

*4 Species behavior, ecological niche occupied, and utility for humans are critical dimensions of taxonomy in indigenous cultures. Biologists have only recently discovered the wealth of information embedded in plant names given by Native Americans.

*5 A coureur des bois, or “wood runner,” was an unlicensed, freelance, and barely legitimate trader who exchanged goods, often including alcohol, with Indians in order to obtain furs. A voyageur worked for a chartered colonial company, such as the Northwest Company or Hudson’s Bay Company.

*6 See especially his section on Protestant converts to French Catholicism in the chapter on “The English Apostates,” and his examination of settlers who struggled with and often clung to their adopted Native American identity in the chapter on “The White Indians” (Axtell, Invasion Within, 287–301; 302–27).

*7 “I am an abducted person; we are all abductees.”

*8 The catechism is a compilation of the fundamental principles of the Catholic faith, in the form of questions and answers.

*9 Both the theater director and program graciously acknowledged that the venue, the Segal Centre, is on the traditional territory of several First Nations people. It also acknowledged that it had been a diplomatic meeting place for many other First Nations people.

*10 There are actually two different Mishomis Books, written by Edward Benton-Banai and illustrated by Joe Liles. The children’s version consists of five books, each with twenty pages of story, illustrated with line drawings to color in, and including exercises, language lessons, and discussion questions. The adult version of the book is widely referred to as a source of traditional Anishinaabe teachings, or the teachings of the grandfathers and grandmothers.

*11 A Mishomis Book uses male-gendered nouns and pronouns. I use the original language but encourage the reader to consider this linguistic survival to refer to all people.

*12 Anishinaabe term for a person of white or European ancestry.

*13 Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which deals with federal powers, refers to Native American nations as separate entities on par with foreign nations. “Congress shall have the power to regulate Commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”

*14 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007

†15 Notably the “Marshall Trilogy,” three Supreme Court cases between 1823 and 1832 clarifying and reaffirming Native American sovereignty

*16 The exact nature of Native American relationships with totems is hotly disputed among anthropologists. Theresa Schenck, in “The Algonquian Totem and Totemism: A Distortion of the Semantic Field” argues that totems, or dodems, for Native Americans are merely clan identifiers with no spiritual connotations, and that the deeply spiritual connections attributed to Native American totem relationships are a creation of anthropologists who imported notions of totemism from studies of indigenous Australians (Schenck, “Algonquian Totem,” 341–53). Michael Pomedli acknowledges the existence of the argument, but provides abundant evidence throughout his Living with Animals: Ojibwe Spirit Powers that Native Americans did indeed have intimate connections with clan totems (Pomedli, Living with Animals, 134).

*17 The rights of nature is a concept that has achieved legal recognition in courts in New Zealand and Ecuador, among others, used in support of indigenous people’s efforts to preserve environmental quality through protection of rivers.

*18 Bonsai is the ancient Chinese and later Japanese practice of miniaturizing trees that are grown in containers. Penjing is the practice of miniaturizing trees to produce a landscape with multiple plantings and stones or sculptures within the containers.

*19 One news article, from the Montreal Gazette, reports that butterflies alive at this exhibit’s end are put in envelopes and shipped to another exhibit.² Shipping butterflies is another troubling matter, as many butterflies are crushed while being put inside of envelopes. “The North American Butterfly Association (NABA) points out that ‘many wedding planners now avoid butterflies at weddings because they not infrequently arrive dead, or half-dead.’”³

*20 I am not alone in finding the exhibition’s title troublesome. An article published on the North American Butterfly Association website and authored by leading butterfly experts ( Jeffrey Glassberg, president of NABA; Paul Opler, author of Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Butterflies; Robert M. Pyle, author of Audubon Society Field Guide to Butterflies; Robert Robbins, curator of Lepidoptera, Smithsonian Institution; and James Tuttle, president of the Lepidopterists’ Society) is titled “There’s No Need to Release Butterflies—They’re Already Free.”

*21 The theme of a disconnection from nature in an urban context is explored in “Analysis of Urban Farming Practice through the Lens of Metabolic Rift: Case Studies at the City of Chengdu in China and at the City of Freiberg in Germany.”

*22 Boas’s transformation and awakening are analyzed with great sensitivity in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, edited by Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner.

†23 John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks was conceived in this context. Neihardt, an ethnographer, poet, and author, collaborated with Black Elk to rescue remaining traces of his tribe’s Indian culture. Both shared an understanding that with the land gone, only Indian teachings and stories remained. They believed, to different degrees, that the culture could be preserved if it were written down. For Black Elk, performing dances in pageants, famously Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, was another opportunity to preserve his culture. However, Black Elk struggled to his dying days with a sense of failure because he had not been able to restore his people to their glory on their ancestral lands. Similar echoes of ethnographic preservation of Native American culture are to be found in James Walter Hoffman’s The Mide’wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa. This extraordinarily detailed ethnographic study of Ojibwe traditional knowledge keepers, published in 1891, was a collaboration between a white settler and indigenous people who also believed that Indian culture could be written down, captured, and preserved.

*24 The actor, who called himself “Iron Eyes Cody,” famously played American Indians in Hollywood Western movies and television programs. His claims to being Native American were unmasked when it was proved that he was actually a second-generation Italian-American.

*25 The notion of wealth sharing is not antithetical to the spirit of capitalism. Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, is often portrayed as the spiritual godfather of laissezfaire economics. However, in his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith notes that the very entrepreneurs who are driven by the pursuit of self-interest “are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford the multiplication of the species.”³

*26 The terms salvage ethnography and salvage anthropology refer to the efforts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, such as Franz Boas, which attempted to capture and record what were assumed to be the last remaining material fragments of disappearing Native American culture.