Aiabens

Editor's Note: This is part three of a series of linked genealogical captions that work better if you go back two pictures and work forward. The text in the other two pictures has not been changed.

 

So I should clarify where we are on my family tree.

 

If you've paid attention to these tales of genealogy I've posted over the last few years, you might recall that I was adopted as an infant. As such, I follow both a legal tree of the people who raised me and gave me my name, and a genetic tree of the people from whom I am actually biologically descended. Personal experience has told me that the nature vs. nurture fight winds up a draw, so I give both trees equal weight. That Rhode Island guy with the Shakespearean comedy of a wedding I posted a few weeks back? That was the legal tree, specifically on my Mom's side. This one comes from the genetic tree, along the portion of my birth mother's line that tracks back to the Native American people known as the Ojibway and the chief represented in the lithograph above.

 

The problem when trying to track ancestry through a Native American group, though, is that none of them had much of a written language. What the Ojibway had of written records amounts mostly to a few legends recorded in pictographs and hash marks etched on old birch bark scrolls and a couple of sacred copper plates, and those didn't include birth records. Most of what predates European contact was preserved solely in oral tradition. And any records of anybody that existed after the time of European contact were kept by the Europeans, but the Europeans weren't all that great at transcribing things, either. Everything the Europeans wrote down until about a generation or so after the chief pictured above was rife with errors and full of often inaccurate conjecture. But I believe in tradition, so I'll conject.

 

The history of the Ojibway people is murky, but tradition holds that the tribe traces back to a larger group of coastal people called the Anishinaabeg, who lived near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River until sometime around the 14th or 15th centuries. But then around the year 1400, give or take a few generations, the group packed up and left the coast. Nobody knows why, though tradition and reasoned guesses from academics suggest a growing conflict between the Anishinaabeg and the Iroquois, who had already established their confederation. Over an unknown period that might have taken a year or might have lasted a generation, the Anishinaabeg moved up the St. Lawrence and through the Great Lakes, finally pausing at the current site of Sault Ste. Marie and the series of rapids that once existed at the outlet of Lake Superior. There--again, for unknown reasons, though spoken lore cites the intervention of spirits in the form of cranes and bears--the Anishinaabeg split into three smaller groups. One group went north and east into Ontario and became the Ottawa. A second group went south along Lake Michigan into the Lower Peninsula and became the Potawatomi. A third group stayed at the falls of Sault Ste. Marie and established a semi-permanent community called Baawiting. This is the group that became the Ojibway.

 

The Ojibway were a restless people in constant motion, though, and they soon spread from Sault Ste. Marie along both the north and south shores of Lake Superior. They established a second large community near LaPointe on what is now called Madeline Island. And they spread out into dozens of smaller, mostly permanent settlements across Michigan's Upper Peninsula and into Wisconsin and Minnesota. During this period of expansion, they began a long series of conflicts with the Sioux, a group the Ojibway soon saw as mortal enemies, and they maintained a number of smaller conflicts with other neighboring groups. By the time the first French traders wandered through the Great Lakes in the late 1600s, the Ojibway had become the region's dominant people.

 

Which eventually brings us to Aiabens, the "Chippeway Chief" in that nifty lithograph painted by Charles King and published in Philadelphia in 1836. There's not a lot of information about Aiabens, and what information there is winds up confused in the jumble of alternate spellings of the guy's name. I've found the name spelled at least 20 different ways, though it's obvious they all track back to the same guy. And he contributed to this as much as anybody else, using a different collection of letters every time he signed a treaty. (But then, every new spelling I've discovered has opened the door to a new nugget of information, which is why I'm updating the original text.)

 

Aiabens--whose name in English means "Little Buck"--was first mentioned in the notes of Henry Schoolcraft, the famous scholar of the early 19th century who got so many things about the Ojibways wrong even though he married into the tribe and, according to Robin's research, is a distant cousin of mine by marriage. According to Schoolcraft, Aiabens was the second youngest of six sons born to a chief named Augussawa. (Some sources on the internet have suggested birth years of 1705 for Augussawa and 1745 for Aiabens, though this doesn't seem right, as it would have made Aiabens 80 years old when he signed the Treaty of Prairie du Chien. That guy up there in the painting doesn't look 80. Moreover, a 1745 birth for Aiabens would mean he lived to be about 110, which just doesn't seem plausible.) Schoolcraft used Augussawa and Aiabens as an illustration of the way the Ojibways transferred power and leadership from one generation to the next. According to Schoolcraft, chiefs weren't selected based on hereditary rights, as Aiabens was far down the list of Augussawa's children. Instead, Aiabens had been chosen based on "his courage, his personal strength, and his success in the hunt ...". And that, along with a few items on his lifetime travel itinerary, are the whole of my knowledge of the kind of guy Aiabens was.

 

I also suspect Schoolcraft got the place where Aiabens lived wrong, which is typical of Schoolcraft, as all the other information I've found puts Aiabens around the St. Croix River of Wisconsin. A history of the Ojibways written in the mid-1800s and published in 1885 lists him as a chief of the village at Wisconsin's Rice Lake. It's hard to say just how important a figure Aiabens was among the Ojibways, though I can say the place he holds in the tribe grew more significant as the years went on. The Ojibways weren't necessarily a united nation as much as they were a loose confederation of connected city-states, and when the U.S. government started calling for people to come sign treaties, each of these city-states sent a leader. Aiabens was one of 85 chiefs and warriors who gathered to sign the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1825. The very next year in 1826, he was part of the group of 85 Ojibways who signed the Treaty of Fond du Lac at the future site of Duluth.

 

The Ojibway just kept signing treaties over the next several decades, ceding more and more land around Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to the United States, and Aiabens kept showing up to jot down a different set of letters. (If I thought a sense of humor could track back six generations, I'd say he was doing it on purpose.) In 1837, he went to the future site of Mendota, Minnesota to sign the Treaty of St. Peters, ceding much of northern Wisconsin to U.S. timber companies. He signed the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe, ceding much of the western Upper Peninsula. He went back to La Pointe in 1844 to sign the Isle Royale addendum to the 1842 Treaty. He would have signed the Treaty of La Pointe of 1854, except he grew sick during the negotiations and died before the treaty was complete.

 

The sudden death of Aiabens came at a really bad moment for his particular band and wound up having dire consequences that lasted for decades. The goal of the 1854 negotiations was for the Ojibways to trade the northeastern corner of Minnesota to the United States in exchange for a permanent set of reservations for the different bands of Wisconsin Ojibways. When Aiabens died, the U.S. government refused to recognize the second chief of the St. Croix band as an authorized negotiator, and the band was forced to abandon the treaty negotiations. The tribe lost federal recognition as a result, and with it went any kind government annuity or land rights. The St. Croix band was considered a "lost tribe" for 80 years, until the U.S. government finally granted formal recognition in 1934.

 

But the descendents of Aiabens continued on, shifting the story back east to Sault Ste. Marie. The surviving records indicate Aiabens had six children with "unnamed Indian woman," the youngest of which was a daughter probably born in Sault Ste. Marie around 1818. This daughter was baptized in 1833 under the name Susanne Aiabens at Sainte Anne Catholic Church on Mackinaw Island.

 

And so continue the generations of Clint. Susanne would have a son named Charles and a granddaughter named either Mary or Marie, depending on when in her life you asked. Marie had a son named John. John had a lot of kids, one of whom was a daughter named Yvonne. Yvonne also had a lot of kids, so many in fact that she gave the last one up for adoption in 1973. That kid became me. But all those stories between Aiabens and me will have to wait for another day.

Done