Monday Seminar
Larry Nesper
Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2016-2017)
Anthropology, UW-Madison
This project began as an effort to problematize the legal permitting process by muddying up the chain of title to the Penokees of northern Wisconsin where Gogebic Taconite was proposing to build the largest open-pit iron mine in North America in 2014. It is becoming an account of the interaction between competing conceptions of belonging and difference in the dispossession of the Lake Superior Ojibwe mixed bloods, who had won a treaty stipulation in the mid-nineteenth century for 80-acre individual reserves of land in the areas ceded in two previous treaties, and the consequences of that dispossession for the Ojibwe polities.
Larry Nesper is Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at UW-Madison. His research focuses on the legal and political development of the tribes in the western Great Lakes Region. He is the author of The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Indian Spearfishing and Treaty Rights. He has worked closely with several tribal governments as well as the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. Apart from this research project on the historical trajectory of Lake Superior Ojibwe mixed bloods, he researching the development of the tribal courts in Wisconsin.