Kenosha: Voices Only Heard Through Their Absence

There’s a book I’ve been meaning to read since my 27th birthday: I’ve carried it with with me around the world, from one desk to another. I’ve started and stopped, picked it up and put it down, and now it sits, still with only a few dozen pages read, on my shelf. The words Surviving Genocide glimmer slightly, in gold print, on the side of the dark purple tome—a tome that has spent more time beneath a stack of Chinese textbooks than it has on top. It is, however, an important book for me, in more ways than one.

Before the police shooting in Kenosha, I’d never heard the name of the city before, although, having grown up in Michigan, it neither sounded exotic nor faraway. And it wasn’t. I could identify it as an Ojibwe word: a remnant of a language I’d always seen scattered around the map of the Great Lakes.

My high school offered three foreign languages to choose from: Spanish, French, and German. One year my elementary school even offered after-school Japanese classes that I attended but can scarcely remember. Each of these languages led to a country, somewhere in the world, that I could visit one day: it was possible, at least in my mind’s eye, and it gave the study of the language a clear purpose. Study German, go to Germany. And I did just that: there was a high school trip organized so that we could live with a German family, practice the language with native speakers, and become, in some sense, more worldly.

There was an implicit problem in the lesson that we were all supposed to learn. In Spain, people speak Spanish. In France, people speak French. In Japan, people speak Japanese. But in America, people don’t speak “American.” We didn’t speak any American language, we spoke European languages: the difficulty of understanding, or even pronouncing, place names like Kenosha remained as the sole reminder of what was there before. Ojibwe used to be spoken where I grew up, yet I had no option to learn Ojibwe in school. I didn’t even know the language existed. Arriving at Detroit Metro Airport, there isn’t a single sign printed in any native language. You’ll see signs in English and Japanese, but not Ojibwe. As a child, I understood that Japanese was an important language; that is the main message that those signs declare. Although I wouldn’t have understood signs written in Ojibwe, I could have understood this much, if they had been there: that the language existed, that the language mattered, that it had something to do with us. I went to Germany to practice that language amongst Germans. Imagine if it were possible for a German to come to Detroit to learn Ojibwe, to see and hear it spoken amongst us.

As a child, the only vestiges of the native culture were place names like Pontiac, Saginaw, and Kalamazoo. How is anyone supposed to feel about the lack of connection between these places and their native people, language, and culture? How would I feel if I were of native ancestry myself? On the west coast of the lower peninsula, I see Muskegon, Saugatuck, Manistee. The name tells us who and what the town signifies, and yet it is, of course, a reminder of something now, for the most part, absent. In the Upper Peninsula, I see Munising, Escanaba, Keweenaw. Nobody comes to a place like Kenosha looking for the culture of the Potawatomis, but if they did, what could they possibly find? To talk about “culture” in Kenosha or Pontiac would inevitably mean the culture of either the black or white residents, and, in 2020, would probably be concerning conflict between the two. This absurdity has become so familiar that it’s easily overlooked.

“Michigan” itself is derived from the Ojibwe word mishigami, meaning big lake. I wasn’t taught that in school. Michigan students don’t learn where the name of their state comes from, or, at least, it isn’t mandatory.

When I was brought to Mackinac Island as a child, no one told me that Mackinac is from the Ojibwe mishinii-makinaang (“at the place of many snapping turtles”). To me it was just a place to ride a bike, eat fudge, and take a tour in a horse-drawn carriage. Checking the Mackinac Island website now, I find nothing that would inform tourists that the island used to be a tribal gathering place. Native people held ceremonies and buried their chiefs there. They spoke a language and practiced a religion that, it seemed, nobody had studied, that nobody appreciated or understood.

Interspersed with these names of native etymology in Michigan are names of European origin. Most obvious are the French names like Detroit, Marquette, and Sault Sainte Marie; or English names like Birmingham, Rochester, and Warren.

Some of the more laughable names are Ypsilanti and Troy. Ypsilanti was a hero in the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, and Troy is, of course, the name of the storied ancient city in modern day Turkey. Did the people who named these places not find it at all cruel or disrespectful to rename indigenous lands using words from a culture thousands of miles away? They named the city of Ypsilanti after a war hero who actually did something heroic, but the people who colonized North America were no heroes. They committed genocide against the native people, they enslaved people from more continents than one, and they stripped the land of every natural resource they could get their hands on.

What does this have to do with Kenosha, Wisconsin?

In the early 1800s, over 10,000 Potawatomis lived in communities in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana. Despite the fact that most Potawatomis had sided with the United States during the Blackhawk War in 1832, soon thereafter a U.S. commission summoned leaders from Potawatomi communities and coerced them into ceding the last of their land in Illinois and Wisconsin. By 1845, the government had evicted the vast majority of Potawatomis from their homes against their will. Between 4,000 and 5,000 were moved west of the Mississippi, while at least 3,000 escaped into Canada. A small number resettled along the St. Joseph River in southern Michigan, assimilating into European language, culture, and religion, holding on to their new homes there with the help of Catholic missionaries who, in exchange for their souls, advocated on their behalf. Today, their descendants—the Pokagon band of the Potawatomi—operate the Four Winds Casinos. There are now only five native fluent speakers of the Potawatomi language. To say that their language is endangered would be an understatement. 

The two people in government most responsible for this act of genocide were President Andrew Jackson and Lewis Cass, former Governor of Michigan, then serving as Secretary of War. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, and Cass implemented and oversaw “Indian removal,” putting the act into force. So it was, almost two hundred years ago, that Kenosha lost its native culture and language. The only thing that remains of it now is the city’s name.

Jackson, Cass, and most elected officials thought that the native people were an obstacle to their dream of developing the United States into a prosperous nation whose accomplishments would eclipse those of all other countries of the world. They refused to see what was actually special about this land was not the foreign invaders—what was special about America was the Americans themselves, meaning, in this context, the indigenous people, the indigenous language, the indigenous culture. The land wasn’t a blank slate for drawing up a duplicate of European culture. America had its own culture, and the Europeans who called themselves American did everything in their power to erase it. Now, most Americans live in a nightmare of crumbling highways and abandoned shopping malls, and descendants of slaves and slave-owners fight over the future of this strange society built atop the graves of once-thriving native communities. The 1967 Detroit Riot left 43 dead, hundreds injured, and more than 1,000 buildings destroyed. This isn’t something new that just came out of nowhere. It’s the culmination of generations of Americans feeling deceived by broken promises of liberty and justice.

I remember shuffling up the stairs to my fifth grade classroom as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” rang through the PA system. I remember looking at the flag, putting my hand over my heart, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge Allegiance to the flag

of the United States of America

and to the Republic for which it stands,

one nation under God, indivisible,

with Liberty and Justice for all.

Many people who grew up saying this pledge feel deceived. When they learn about our country’s history, it’s no surprise that they don’t believe there is now, or ever has been, liberty and justice for all. Are they supposed to gloss over the genocide and slavery, to base their sense of nationalism on American soldiers defeating Nazi Germany in World War II? Many people don’t feel proud to live in America, and, to me, it’s not surprising.

In the last couple years I’ve read Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Andrés Reséndez's The Other Slavery, and now, gradually, I’m reading Surviving Genocide, even if it isn’t always at the top of my pile of books.

I’m glad that Americans have access to these books and can learn about the country’s history on their own; however, I know the president hasn’t read any of these books. I know that we’re governed by men and women proud to have been educated at Princeton and Harvard—but the education they’re so proud of, and that marks them out as the elite of law schools and political science programs, has nothing to do with these people, this history, these languages. And I know this isn’t covered in the required reading of our school districts: there are children growing up now whose only connection to the indigenous culture is in their struggle to pronounce and spell the Ojibwe names on the map.