Twenty years ago, scholars of American Indians began turning their attention to labor, focusing on how Native peoples used wage work to support their communities, merge new cultural practices into established traditions, and take a significant role in shifting regional economies. Such studies were also important for being some of the first to trace the experiences of Native Americans in the twentieth century, helping to correct the popular belief that Native people disappeared with the arrival of the modern era.

Chantal Norrgard makes a significant contribution to this body of scholarship with Seasons of Change: Labor, Treaty Rights, and Ojibwe Nationhood. Like earlier studies, Norrgard’s begins with the assertion that “rather than discarding their traditions, American Indians integrated new forms of labor into the social, political, and economic structures in place in their communities in ways that enabled their survival” (2) and explains how the Ojibwe people of the Lake Superior region (which stretches across portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan) “found meaning, sustained traditions, and built community through their work” (3). Norrgard then moves beyond the “common categories used to analyze labor” (3) to emphasize the connections between American Indian work and political rights. Specifically, Norrgard argues that Ojibwe labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was intricately connected to issues of tribal sovereignty and American colonialism, to the point that work became intertwined with Ojibwe nationhood.

More specifically, before European contact, the Ojibwe made a living harvesting maple syrup, berries, birch bark, wild rice, fish, and other plants and animals. Participation in the eighteenth-century fur trade marked Ojibwe entry into the global economy, then the early nineteenth century saw the arrival of commercial timber and fishing enterprises on Ojibwe land. Treaties with the U.S. government in 1837, 1842, and 1854 codified major land cessions and furthered the economic transformation of the region based on the large-scale extraction of natural resources, but also guaranteed Ojibwe rights to sovereignty and traditional gathering activities. Exercising these treaty rights, according to Norrgard, became an act of political agency that served as both an entry into the labor market and resistance to American colonialism.

Norrgard’s chapters explore such dynamics, beginning with how the Ojibwe adapted berry gathering from a traditional activity that provided sustenance and had profound cultural meaning into a commercial activity for a capitalist market that served similar functions. Moreover, the money Ojibwes earned as laborers for large-scale berry farms and from gathering and selling berries directly provided economic autonomy that allowed them to resist government assimilation efforts. Ojibwes also continued to fish and to hunt and trap game, but now did so in conflict with new state and federal conservation laws. By both intentionally violating and challenging these laws in the courts based on their treaty rights, Ojibwe labor became a political act as well as an economic and cultural activity. The growth of the timber industry created particular challenges for Ojibwes, because the influence of lumber companies drove major land cessions, the widespread cutting of timber resulted in profound environmental transformations, and lumbering had no precedent in the traditional Ojibwe economy. Nonetheless, Ojibwes made a living in the timber industry, and, like other wage work, this helped them resist government paternalism while retaining their connections to the land. By the early twentieth century, extractive industries were in decline and the economy of the region shifted to recreational tourism. This provided new opportunities for Ojibwe wage work and commodity production, as Ojibwes made items for sale to tourists and served as performers, guides, and domestic servants, but it also tightened restrictions on hunting, fishing, and gathering that further conflicted with Ojibwe sovereignty.

Overall, Norrgard demonstrates how Ojibwe labor shifted to accommodate the challenges brought on by Euro-American settler colonialism and functioned to support Ojibwe claims to nationhood during a period in which many predicted the demise of Native peoples and communities. Furthermore, Norrgard suggests that the politicizing of work in this period created a foundation for the more publicized and fruitful treaty rights struggles of the late twentieth century. There are points when Norrgard’s focus is perhaps too narrow, and a broader analysis would have furthered our understanding of Ojibwe work and struggles for nationhood. Considering the book’s emphasis on environmental interactions, for instance, Norrgard might have paid more attention to ecological change and employed analytical frameworks common to the field of environmental history. Indeed, recent turns by scholars of American Indians and the environment have emphasized the political nature of indigenous insistence on “traditional ecological knowledge,” or resource management derived from older patterns of indigenous land use, something that seemingly would have a place in Norrgard’s narrative. Such a critique, however, should only reinforce how valuable Seasons of Change is as part of an ongoing conversation arguing for the modern relevancy of indigenous social, cultural, and economic practices.