Red Cliff tribal member named Pulitzer finalist for book that corrects Wisconsin history
RED CLIFF – During long drives through the Rust Belt of Michigan, seeing the abandoned factories of the industrial wasteland, Michael Witgen would often ask himself how we got here.
He would make the drive from Ann Arbor to his familial home on the Red Cliff Ojibwe Reservation in far northern Wisconsin and think about how millions of acres were taken from his ancestors.
“You took all this land and this is what you’ve done with it?” Witgen would ask rhetorically.
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It was these thoughts that led him to research the history of “how we got here” and how this land in what is now Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota was eventually transferred to the United States.
The book, “Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America” is a culmination of Witgen’s research, so far.
His book caught the attention of the Pulitzer Prize Board this year and was named a finalist in the history category.
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“Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion,” read a statement from the Pulitzer website about Witgen’s book. “Deeply researched and passionately written, Seeing Red will command attention from readers who are invested in the enduring issues of equality, equity, and national belonging at its core.”
Seeing Red also won the James A. Rawley Prize this year from the Organization of American Historians.
But Witgen said it’s being a Pulitzer finalist that’s garnering him recognition from his family and community.
“I tell people about the first award, but everyone knows the Pulitzer,” he said.
Witgen’s Pulitzer accomplishment was the first story in the Red Cliff tribal newsletter, Miisaninawiind, this month.
Seeing Red and Witgen’s previous book, “An Infinity of Nations,” challenges the history taught in Western schools that the land around the Great Lakes had been in European possession since the 1600s transitioning from the French to the British and then to the Americans.
Witgen shows how Indigenous peoples far outnumbered colonizers in this land well into the 1800s.
The maps showing that the upper Great Lakes region was in possession by either the French, British or American prior to 1820 are false and Witgen argues is representative of a fake empire.
He found that the Americans had tried to assert their authority in the region soon after the Revolution, but had lost two wars against Indigenous peoples.
And Witgen found that it took the U.S. a long time to draw colonists to the region because of poor farmland, especially in the upper Great Lakes region, but the logging industry eventually grew.
As America’s presence in the region grew the Ojibwe people resisted removal by the government to areas west of the Mississippi River.
Through treaties, Ojibwe peoples ceded millions of acres to the U.S. mostly for logging, but the Ojibwe people retained the right to hunt and fish on that land and live on reservations in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Wisconsin didn’t become a state until 1848.
“That’s really late,” Witgen said. “American history is really Indigenous history.”
He’s currently working on another history book, but doesn’t expect that to be published for at least two years.
Witgen is an enrolled citizen of the Red Cliff Ojibwe Nation in northern Wisconsin along the shores of Lake Superior. He is a professor of history at Columbia University.
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Frank Vaisvilas is a former Report for America corps member who covers Native American issues in Wisconsin based at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact him at fvaisvilas@gannett.com or 815-260-2262. Follow him on Twitter at @vaisvilas_frank.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Michael Witgen's book is a Pulitzer finalist, aims to correct Wisconsin history
