Picture nightfall in Michigan's snow-covered wintertime:
a golden sun setting in the west behind thousands of trees, their bare
limbs outstretched; mighty pines towering into the sky's gradations of
blue; the stillness of snow in below-freezing temperatures. In a tiny clearing
in the virgin forest, a few cabins provide a little candlelight glow as
darkness swallows the rest of the landscape. Imagine one of the tiny makeshift
cabins and a mother with three restless young boys - perhaps she turns
to her Bible for spiritual strength and stories to tell her children during
the difficult winter. This is "Annarbour," Michigan, in1824. Thus begins
our journey through Ann Arbor's many histories of religious, racial and
ethnic communities. |
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[Biblical
Influence in Settlers' Lives]
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Of course, Native Americans are the first people who
walked the scenic lands we now know as Ann Arbor. It is their many systems
of belief, then, that academics recognize - directly or indirectly - as
the city's first religious activity. Like the rest of our Nation, though,
this people group was frighteningly pushed from the land and silenced -
or misrepresented - in much of the historical records we have today. |
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Unfortunately, white scholars have left behind inadequate
and often insensitive accounts for posterity. In her History of Earliest
Ann Arbor, Nettie Schepeler-Van Der Werker recognizes Washtenaw County's
tribes (Ojibwa, Ottowa, Huron and Pottawatomi: 9), but follows with
a description of the "savages" who "roamed and built their wigwams" (3) She omits any mention of their rituals and family life, as well as
the negative treatment they had previously endured from French missionaries
who imposed their beliefs upon the tribes (Marty, 7-9.) The author
then explains, with some sympathy, the white settlers' fear of Native tribes
when displaced indigenous people occasionally returned (9) |
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The struggle for inclusion in society often characterizes
how the white, Western-European settlers from second- or third-generation
New England families (Stephenson, 7-8) received each new immigrant group's
strange tongue and foreign religious practices. For, as the conflicts between
Native American and Native-born white settler decreased, the eventual difficulties
of new immigrants were about to take place. |