To understand the place of Native people in the regional economy today, scholars take a long-term or historical approach. Before the American era, Native people worked for wages and produced goods for the market, playing a vital part in the Great Lakes economy.

Listen to historian Dave Edmunds discuss Potawatomi entrepreneurship in the 1840s

In the mid-19th century, they lost access to resources and to jobs. Historians, such as Melissa Meyer, have documented the marginalization of Native people and the subsequent poverty that resulted. Meyer drew on many different kinds of sources as she came to her conclusions, including transcripts of Congressional hearings that established how this marginalization occurred.

Read excerpts from Meyer’s evidence

Excerpts from the testimony at a congressional investigation of fraud at White Earth, July 25, 1911-March 28, 1912 (House Report 1336, 62d Congress, 3rd session):

Inspector E. B. Linnen: “When it became possible for adult mixed bloods to dispose of their lands, the full bloods sold theirs as well, not only their lands but the pine timber, and a concerted effort seems to have been made by the land buyers to establish every full-blood Indian who had valuable land or timber as an adult mixed blood, which was done by false, fraudulent, or forged affidavits on which to base applications for fee patents. . . . In numerous instances they purchased the lands of minors . . ., with full knowledge of the fraud they were perpetrating” (p. 730).

An Ojibwa, Mah-dash: “[He] would not give me my trust patent which he had. [They] gave me $1,000 cash . . . . They got [a man] to make an affidavit that I was mixed blood. That was not true. I told them I was a full blood and they knew it was so. The papers I signed were not read to me and I didn’t know to understand them” (p. 1005).

Judge M. C. Burch, Department of Justice: “Indians would be allotted land. Oftentimes, if examined at all, it would be found to be of little value. They would sell it cheap to the grafters, of course. . . . The purchaser would then, by procuring the description to be switched, obtain a more valuable or, at least, desirable description to be substituted, for which the ignorant allottee would execute a deed to his cunning purchaser” (p. 247).

More recently, historians and others have challenged the view, held at one time by federal officials in Indian Affairs, that Native people are unable to compete in a market economy today or that, if individuals do make a good living in a money economy, they have somehow lost their identity as Indians. Historian Brian Hosmer studied the Menominee’s successful logging and sawmill business, which the Menominees achieved by pushing the federal government to implement sustained yield management and by rejecting the federal government’s goal of encouraging private property and the accumulation of individual wealth. In contrast, Menominee leaders in the 20th century linked cultural survival and the commercial development of logging so that the wage work of individuals was compatible with community values. Logging and sawmill employees worked for the community, not outside corporations. Profits went to the community as a whole in the form of a “poor fund,” hospital, and per capita payments to tribal members. Menominees insisted that the community as a whole owned the trees.

Read excerpts from Hosmer’s evidence

Elderly Menominee men protest reductions in their per capita payments from sawmill profits: [We] “always supposed the funds called the Menominee Indian Funds belonged to the Tribe, to be used for their benefit.” (Letter from GAR Post No. 261 to President Woodrow Wilson, June 27, 1913, in Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives).

Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells replied, rejecting the idea that the tribally owned sawmill should serve the collective well-being: “It has been the view of the office that the making of generous per capita payments to Indians was not conducive to their best interests . . . .” Rather, “an opportunity for regular employment such as is afforded by the Menominee Mills is of infinitely greater value to the majority of the Menominee than per capita payments would be.” (Letter to GAR Post No. 261, August 1, 1913, in Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives).

Menominees insisted that they, rather than non-Indians, should manage their logging business. Leader Reginald Oshkosh, with the backing of other Menominees, argued his qualifications: “I believe that having been born and reared as a child of the woods, having witnessed logging operations from the time of my childhood, having been educated in one of the leading Indian schools of the country, and having been more or less intimately associated with the present manufacturing plant at Neopit, that I am competent and qualified to succeed you as manager of the plant at Neopit.” (from Hearings of the Joint Commission of the United States to Investigate Indian affairs, Pt. 8, Menominee, 63rd Congress, 2nd session, 1914, p. 780).

The Menominee attitude toward economic development—that is, development as a means to an end not a goal in itself—is widely shared among the Native communities in the region. What are the culturally valued ends? The research of social scientists, including anthropologists and political scientists, documents the many ways that Native cultural values guide economic decision-making, including decisions about how to produce for the market and how business profits should be allocated. Economic profits support tribal sovereignty. The concept of “Seven Generations,” or the protection of resources for future generations, shapes tribal management of forests, water, fish, rice, and game animals. Commercial activity coexists with subsistence practices, such as hunting, fishing, and ricing. Profits from tribally-owned businesses, including casinos, are widely redistributed so that all members of the community benefit. Tribal income is used to perpetuate cultural identity and a distinct way of life. Scholars stress that this economic philosophy should be viewed as “indigenous capitalism,” a specific variant or type of capitalism and of development that expands our understanding of what capitalism is and what it can be and that challenges the idea that indigeneity is inevitably linked to poverty.