The Sauk and Mesquakie Cultural Resistance to Settler Colonialism

This paper discusses two themes: “Place and belonging, ethnic, cultural and religious minorities,” and “How does literature depict the struggle for recognition”. It does so through an analysis of the actions of the Sauk and Mesquakie Indians living in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa during the early nineteenth century, as they were seen by their white neighbors, and through the pages of Sauk leader Black Hawk’s biography. The first such account dictated by an anti-American, unacculturated Native American. It relates the tribal annual round of fall hunting, spring maple sugar harvesting, and summer farming as the villagers used their local resources with traditional labor and ceremonies. In his autobiography, Black Hawk recounts the villagers’ responses to a fraudulent treaty which stripped the tribes of their land, and their unsuccessful three decade-long struggle to overturn that document. He discusses their annual village ceremonies and relates their connections to a particular place. He expresses the Sauk determination to remain at their principal village because it was the site of their major cemetery and the religious rites related to their ancestors practices there. When several tribal leaders agreed to relocate west of the Mississippi River, conservative Sauks objected to abandoning the grave site. For the Mesquakie, the dispute focused more of the seizure of their traditional lead-mining lands in Iowa and Wisconsin which they claimed had never been surrendered to the United States. The existing literature demonstrates how the Indians’ ideas about culture and place underlay their actions and brought ultimate tragedy