Throughout much of the nineteenth-century
in Ojibwe communities in the western Great Lakes of the United States,
community members participated in a medically plural environment, seeking
medical care from within their own communities as well as from French and
Scots-Irish fur traders, New England Protestant missionaries, and
federally-affiliated physicians at forts. Medical care circulated between
settlers, traders, and Ojibwe communities, both instantiating social bonds and
inflaming epistemic and religious differences.
This paper argues that while often overlooked in the historiography of nineteenth-century Native spaces in the Midwest, health and healing were central material concerns in these mixed colonial spaces, and as such health and healthiness became slippery frameworks for power relationships between Ojibwe community members, missionaries, traders, and Indian agents. Chronic and acute illnesses and injuries brought these diverse social groups into intimate contact and shaped their political, economic, and religious ventures. The entanglement of physical health with both material and cosmological consequence framed which practices and whose labor qualified as medical and whose body qualified as healthy. This paper draws from nineteenth-century economic claims on land-cessation treaties from 1837 and 1855 to examine how various claimants, including white and mixed or married-in families, scripted medical care as superstitious, scientific, or social, operationalizing medical care as an economic and political good while simultaneously attesting to the social malleability of medical caregiving.
