How to Lie with Settler Maps: Place-Names, Settler Myths, and the Colonial Re-naming of Potawatomi Homelands

• In Event: In Pieces: Allotments, Kuleana, and Alienated Indigenous Territories

Abstract

Situated in Neshnabé Ke or Potawatomi homelands (currently known as the Great Lakes region of North America), the focus of this paper is drawn from a chapter of my book, Mapping Neshnabé Futurity. I discuss the various technologies settler colonial expansion used to actualize Indigenous dispossession while advancing settler futurity. The seizure of Indigenous territories in our Michigan and Indiana homelands, from land grabs to pipeline projects, is compounded by discursive mechanisms of erasure. Therefore, this analysis examines the history of dispossession via place-names—including both Potawatomi and settler-imposed names—to expose geographic misrepresentations that erase Native presence and substantiate settler claims to the occupied territory. Narratives of settlement, such as the fictional account of Princess Mishawaka who falls in love with a French fur trader (the place-name is actually derived from the Potawatomi word Mshéwaké, signifying “place of large trees,” and referencing the Indiana town of Mishawaka), effectively obliterate Indigenous history to further the ongoing settler colonial project of encroachment. The purposeful misrepresentation of Indigenous place-names by settlers, even after repeated correction by tribal authorities, constitutes an attempt at self-indigenization through emplacement projects. In parallel, the late 19th-century creation of the Round Oak Stove Company, the fictional character “Chief Doe-wah-jack,” is eponymously linked to Dowagiac, Michigan, the center of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi’s territory. In addition to print media, advertising, and campaigns for sports teams and city tourism, Round Oak also published children’s literature and commissioned sculptures of the mythological chief. So steeped into non-Native understandings of history, residents, even those who take an interest in local history such as nearby historical societies, still believe that the town of Dowagiac was named after a chief. They are surprised to learn he never existed and that the anglicized spelling in fact comes from the Potawatomi phrase, Ndowathek, meaning “place of harvesting.” False accounts of Princess Mishawaka and Chief Doe-wah-jack actively undermine Indigenous perspectives and their relationship with their environment, while simultaneously solidifying colonial futures. While pipelines in our communities’ water ways dispossess Native peoples from healthy ecologies as well as traditional territories physically, stories about made-up Indians dispossess Neshnabé peoples symbolically and guarantee settler claims to place. Chief Doe-wah-jack’s symbolic value was the marketing of stoves, while Princess Mishawaka’s symbolic value is the marketing of the Indiana city—both result in significant material accumulations of wealth meant to ensure the prosperity of settler capitalist futurities. This discussion concludes with an examination of contemporary community-based counter-mapping projects in the Great Lakes region. These initiatives, incorporating both terrestrial Indigenous narratives and celestial re-namings (through Potawatomi constellations and timekeeping mechanisms), illustrate a future of renewed Indigenous spatial control. These projects, which I term “Neshnabé futurisms,” transcend mere preservation of traditional knowledge or resistance to settler dispossession. They are imagined landscapes of possibility that depart from the versions of the future posited by settler society in which Indigenous communities are vulnerable and helpless or are completely irrelevant.

Author

• Blaire K Morseau, Michigan State University