Excerpt: Those Native peoples who were able to remain behind in the Midwest have done so either without reservations or with reservations that are generally much smaller than their Western counterparts. They have also done so while maintaining smaller populations amid a more thorough pattern of colonizer settlement. And so during the past 200 years, Indigenous midwesterners have often had to develop somewhat different tactics and strategies for resistance, survival, and adaptation than have some of the Native peoples across the Missouri River. Native nations of the Midwest have countered ongoing colonial pressures through political and economic struggles, and cultural and social adaptations, in a long, multifaceted equation that Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe from Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation) has termed “survivance.”
