Wonderful person to introduce here. And the wonderful part about this is that this event has happened in such a circular synergistic cooperative and loving way i can tell you i first learned about the book the tentative agreement coming out through the pipeline. I saw dr. Miles. Yes, it just started like that. And here you are. Weve been talking on email. I love the fact that you are here. The nonfiction bookstore. In our book fair in the categories of history and Culture Health and wellbeing. Without any further ado i want to introduce you to stephen for with history of his very own i am proud to be introducing my friend and colleague as you will hear from what i tell you and what she will present to you. She is a fierce intellectual force. I want you to know that shes one of the nicest and warmest people that you will ever get to meet. She is an Author University teacher and public historian. With the native native american history. The story of a turkey family published in 2005 next the house on diamond hill. She followed those words. With the study of race and gender. From the civil war era. Also a writer of fiction her debut novel the cherokee rose is set on the plantation. It was named the publisher week weekly pick there as well. And selected for from the Georgia Center of the book. At the university of michigan as you heard. In the departments of American CultureAfrican American studies. History, native american studies in women womens studies. She is a 2011 Macarthur Foundation fellow. Her current work on slavery is supported by another and that research has resulted in the book that we are launching here to discuss and learn about and celebrate. The dawn of detroit the chronicle of slavery and freedom. Im going to sit in a moment. This is my throne for the evening. I must listen to what she has instructed me to do. How happy i am. And how warm the space feels. I cant imagine a better place am so grateful for inviting me to do this. Im also grateful to you for coming out to discuss the history and to learn a little bit more about the city of detroit. I think where i would like to begin with telling you how i came to doing this project. Then i will talk about a few of the things that stood out to me. And then we have some time for discussion. We can talk about what we collectively think and even histories like this that are old histories what they mean for contemporary writers and how they can be an asset in trying to solve a problem of social division today. Let me tell you how i came to this project. Im from Cincinnati Ohio i grew up with a strong identity of the granddaughter of a woman who came up to the great migration in cincinnati and i also lived close to the ohio river as a child. I associated that river with freedom with the line between slavery and freedom you can stand at the bank and you can see kentucky. That was meaningful for me growing up the idea that i grew up in a free state. The time passed things happened and i started a position here at 2002. And when when i got here i had relearned the place of the midwest. Michigan is not the same as ohio. But this is a different kind of place and one of the reasons why its so unique is again because of the international border. So one of the ways that i began to begin to explore this place was with my students im really touched that some of them are actually here today. It warms my heart that they are here. One of the things that we did was go on local history tours with africanamerican groups. It was a county back in ann arbor. Something that really stuck with me was focused along the underground railroad. I learned for the first time that is how active southeastern michigan has been. We began to recognize some important sites but also in our town of ann arbor. And we got to go to the historical museum. I hope you will go if you have never been there. Im sure you had been there. But at that museum they have the underground railroad. It was very small. It was enough to get our imaginations going. It was around 2009 i think. We did research and projects on it. Thats it open the door to me. What have taken place here in this area. Thats where i started. With the underground railroad. And i was doing research and women in particular i was reading her memoir and when i saw that she kept pulling to the laws of michigan and a brat very proud way. In looking at some of those laws of michigan that she was talking about she fought for black rates. Who fought for black equality. She was correct in the state of michigan there was support for the slave same people who are trying to get their freedom in the years before the civil war. But one thing she did not actually mentioned in her memoir was at previous michigan law has made slavery possible in the directly sanctioned slavery. And once i realized that i thought that was a story i needed to tell. There was not enough information about it. I did not know anything a thing about it in ohio. I had been teaching at the university or a handful of years i did not and did not know a thing about it. I really felt that the knowledge was disrespectful to our ancestors and disrespectful to the forebears and the people who came before the abolitionist. Instantly abolitionists. Instantly before us. Who lived lives of great suffering and great sorrow but through it all were heroic. Who pushed for their freedom who banded together. And actually did incredible things. So once i started down this path i have the good fortune of being able to apply for a program at the university of michigan and was allowed with faculty to work with students. We spent time in the bentlily beer in ann arbor, one of the students in the group was from on tearey. Wonderful. She would go home on her vacation in the school year and hit the archives in ontario and find out more information. So we spent about two years collecting information, seeing what we could find, and also part of the process was translating that information because some was in french some in german. The process was transcribing the information because some of the old documents in the fancy cursive, impossible to read. So it took us two years just to get to get to the point where we could say we have sense of the enslaved population, sense of the numbers were talking be, a list of the people who own enslaved people, sense of job they were doing. And that point i realized, that even though it had taken us quite a while to find the material and even though the primary sources, the record that existed, were actually very few and far between, that there was enough material to tell a story here about the enslaved people who actually built the city. From that point on i started working on trying to piece together the story, and i felt like i really was dealing with bread crumbs because it was a little bit here and a mention there and a name here. There was very few full and complete stories. Thats partly because we just dont have in the same kind of records here that we have on slavery in the south, for instance. So in the southern states, scholars rely on slave narrative. The life stories of enslaved people, that they were able to rite and have published after they escaped or that speak a little louder, please. I will try to, sir. Maybe ill stand up and that might help. So i was saying that in the southern states, scholars rely quite a lot on slave narrative, that is, the stories of enshaved people they were able to dispute have publish evidence after they escaped or they were able to tell to interviewers. We dont have slave narratives. We dont have personal stories. Barely he mentioned of enslaved people in the records. And that is in part because there wasnt the same kind of governmental infrastructure here, this used to be a military fort town. It didnt have a court for a very long time even. Thats also because of the great fire of 1805, which wiped out the whole town, which meant the loss of many records. So, piecing this together was like work with bread crumbs and it was frustrating at times, but in the end i felt that there was enough to at least create a composite picture of the lives of enslaved people. So, im going to tell you just a little bit about what some of these individuals did and what their lives were like as far as we were able to determine, and i want to share a few of the findings i concluded with, and that i think well be right about the time that miss jones will tell me we need to out of the q a. So one most important things that became clear to us as we were doing this research, was that the first enslaved people in the city, in this state, and actually in many places in the country, were not africanamerican but, rather, they were native americans. So when we talk about slavery in detroit were talking first about an enslaved indigenous population. And within that were talking especially about women, native american women made up the alarms population of enslaved people here in detroit. And they came from multiple different native nations. Some were odala, some iroquoisan. Some miami, some fox, some of them were women who had been captured from other tribal nations, often times as a distance but not always, and were traded, sometimes by other native american people, and then finally traded into the hands of the european settlers. First, the french, then the british. And then actually a few americans were Still Holding native american enslaved people into the early 1800s. So that is i think the most important and biggest thing we discovered on our research team, was that slavery in detroit was aphone that affected native american women, and the kind of slavery that they endured was i abominable. You can probably anticipate what im got to say. Enslaved native american women were put into european households, and they did Domestic Work and they were also the victims of sexual slavery. Were familiar with this in the u. S. South. We know at this point that africanamerican women were sexually assaulted and abused. As was a regular course of their experience. And to our research in detroit we have discovered that native american women were, too and that na fact some of these merchants and traders in detroit, some of the richest ones, would make specific purchase orders asking for native women. Now, the name they used, the term the used for a native american enslaved person panis. And scholars have tried to work out where that term came from. A colonial historian has come up with a good theory is which is that this term e term probably is the collapsing of verious different native American Tribal names, especially pawnee, every native american enslaved person was not panis, but the term panis came to be used for all native enslaved people here in detroit. Some of the merchants would write letters to one another between here, mackinaw, mackinaw island, for instance, and they would say, i need two pretty panis. They would say the ages of the girls they wanted. That kind of language is an indicator that these young girls, who were wanted, were more just cleaning up the kitchen, right . This was major find and a distressing find, and a find we need to recognize and look at. Especially given the continuing vulnerability and invisibility often times of indigenous girlss and young women. And we also found that in addition to native american enwomen, africanamerican men were highly south out by traders and by merchants in detroit. Theres a man named james sterling, who moved from new york to detroit, to establish a shop, the fur trade shot, and before he even got here, the started trying to ask around to get black men, he could buy them, he wanted to bring black men with him to detroit, which is an indication that the felt he couldnt really set up shop and launch his business and make a success at it without black men. Over time james sterling was able to buy a few young black men, and he would competent in this recorded about them, some of them spoke multiple languages, and even commented that it were better workers than the white men he was paying, which is part of the reason why he preferred them. So, black men were actually the Railroad Cars that were carrying those furs, that made this place so successful and so lucrative, across plains. Im talking about their bodies, their muscles. That was the motor for the distribution of these fur. We hear about the fur trade and recognize it was the hunting that native men did of beaver, their trade of those beaver to french and then british, people in between in the trade, and then the shipment of the beaver to the east, and across the ocean, places like france and england. We recognize that was a major fuel of a worldwide, global growing industry. But until the students and i did this research, didnt know that black men did a lot of the labor of packing those furs, carrying those furs, moving those temperatures across the water in canoes and then some of the really efficientminded merchants near detroit, once they had their enslaved black men move the furs to places like new york the weather turned cold, they would rent these men or let their friend borrow the men over the winter, and then when the rivers thawed and they could come back, the enslaved men would be asked the wrong word be compelled to bring the goodded exchanged for the temperatures back here to detroit. And black men and native american men were also skilled boatsmen. These great lakes all the time with these furs. And sometimes the wealthiest merchants, such as john askin, would say i cant spare my man, pompeii, for instance, black man owned by askin, for this job. I need him on my boat. So when it came time for pompeii to be on those ships, his rashes were left to those of the white men being paid to do that work. Enslaved black men died working the great lakes, which really are inland seas, and when youre on them to me they feel that way. Those were dangerous waters. These men were out there doing this work and not because they made a cent. They were separated from their families, doing this work. One story that stands out to me is a story of an enslaved black family owned bay wealthy detroit merchant named james may. James may was judge. He was someone who was actually very instrumental and went to the university of michigan, and he kept one of his black men on his boat and he kept his black mans wife back at home, working in his household. Doesnt pick the time to name these individuals for us because they werent important enough to him to do that. But they were out in these roles, and there was a terrible ship wreck, and the black man owned by may was killed in the wreck. May then wrote to his friend, john askin, and first he said he was distressed about the wreck because he lost his valuable man. His brother also identity but he didnt talk much about the brother. Hes thinking about the he says human property thats gone and then he says, now that the man was gone, the black woman wont do any work, just laid around, crying. Uhhuh. So, this is a terrible story, but through the story we actually see, we get a glimpse of, a black family, a black family that loved one another, that cares for one another, that is distressed and fall as i part when their loved one is taken by the waters. So when james mays black woman, as he refers to her, cant work because she e she is in mourning, he gets they, maybe if i buy her son from the friend and bring her son into hi household, that will cheer her up. We get another indication of how the family has been split and divided. So james may tried to get the son, but his friend says, sorry, im keeping this black boy for myself. One more snippet before i conclude and that is a rare look at the experience of a native American Woman who was enslaved in detroit, and this is very difficult to get at because we just dont have the material, we just dont have the recordespecially on native women. When we do have the material, it comes from st. Anns church, and the st. Anns church, very old, its the second oldest parish in the country. And im grateful to them for letting me see their records. I have to say when i first told them what the topic was at the archdiocese, they were receptive but also said, youre not going find anything about slaves in these records. Well, not only were there enslaved people all up and down the records but the priests owned slaves. So, going back to this story bat native American Woman coming out of the city st. Anns Church Records, we dont know her name. Thats common. In these records. We dont know her age. We dont get any kind of a sent of who she was as a person because the recordkeepers werent interested in that. We do know is that she was enslaved and was pregnant, and then she was imprisoned inside the fort. There was a debate, some conflict, tension, over who was going to get that baby. Uhhuh. Two men inside the fort were both saying that the baby should come to them. They werent saying something like, this is my child, i want that child because i want to free that baby. They were just saying, the panis during referring to an indian slave native slave the panis should come to me. So, turns out they thisser gun smicket of the forth won in that conflict, and he was going to get to have possession of the little infant, and what happened to the woman . We dont know. I have thought about this, thought about her, many a night, about her being pregnant, and enslaved, probably the records dont tell us but probably the victim of sexual exploitation, giving birth in the cell and then seeing her child taken away bit one of these two european men in the fort, who wanted to possess that child. St. Anns Church Records are full of details of the deaths and burials of, quote, panis infants, panis children, about little babies being porn right mere in detroit tone slaved native mothers and died before they even had a chance at life. Many of this stories, jerry upsetting to discover some theyre growing know recount them to you, and i can see in your eyes its distressing for you to hear them, but i want to tell you, that one of the things that has been important for me, porn for the students in doing the work, is that all these people whose stories i have told you about, even we dont know their names, we are remembering them and my view that means we are honoring them, recognizing that they were here, they lived, their labor contributed in incredible ways to the development and the growth of detroit. And their suffering is not in vain because we hold them in our hearts. I know i do. We hold them in our spirits. And in addition to that, the enslaved people of detroit, they thought, why was that woman inprisonned . The reports dont tell us but i wondered about that. Did she try run away . What kind of rule did she break . I am betting she was imprisoned because shoe fought back, she fought somebody, and they said, we are going to punish you for this. But that doesnt take away the power of her fight. And enslaved people in detroit, native people, black people, they fought all the time. Th