Date of Award

5-2026

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

History

First Advisor

Wilson J. Warren, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

José António Brandão, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Ángela Pérez-Villa, Ph.D.

Fourth Advisor

Chien Juh Gu, Ph.D.

Keywords

Catholic, culture, education, Michigan, Odawa, religion

Abstract

This project seeks to demonstrate the centrality of education and religion as cultural power levers used by Americans, Odawa, and Catholic missionaries. Though the power of each culture was uneven, efforts to create educational institutions imbued with different denominations of Christianity, as well as continued contestation over land, remade the cultures of all involved. Americans privileged state-building practices, the Odawa acculturated to remain in Michigan when removal policies were enacted throughout the United States, and the Catholic church attempted to proselytize Indigenous communities.

Although the ethnohistorical method needed to be understood in order to write this project, it is not an ethnohistorical study, in the strictest sense. There are elements of ethnohistory: a focus on how cultures changed over time, the language each culture sought to use, and an attempt to make sense of what happened to Indigenous peoples, primarily through Euroamerican and American primary sources. Yet, this project is a broader cultural history within the categories of education and religion in Michigan.

This study will demonstrate the continued need to evaluate how local events shaped national developments. Education in Michigan was both democratic and exclusive, as institutions used the power of the state to further their ideas about what constituted a republican nation, while it also hardened cultural partitions. This study will also highlight the need to broaden a contextual focus on the Boarding School movement that was forced upon many Indigenous peoples in the late nineteenth century. The antecedents to that movement were a complicated mixture of assimilation and acculturation as Indigenous peoples were not inert in these processes. Catholic missionaries and American officials continuously sought to change Indigenous cultures. Religion and education may have formed the backdrop to the cultural interactions of early nineteenth century Michigan history, but it was the people at the local level who made up different cultures that determined the historical outcomes.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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