Maple Sugar Trade Tensions: Abolitionist Expansion and Ojibwe Women's Land Claims in the Upper Great Lakes, 1787 to 1840

Examining the production, trade, and promotion of maple sugar in eastern North America between 1787 and 1840 illustrates the tensions between Ojibwe women’s responses to intensified non-Native settlement in the Great Lakes and the motivations of white, male, American abolitionists. In the late eighteenth century, abolitionists on the Atlantic coast, like Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson, promoted maple sugar as an alternative to cane sugar produced by plantation slavery. In 1787 Jefferson also passed the Northwest Ordinance—organizing and expanding American territory in the Great Lakes with legal limitations on slavery. For Rush and Jefferson, purchasing maple sugar was a path to a future of an expanding, abolitionist republic, but for an economically-elite group of Ojibwe women in the upper Great Lakes, trading in maple sugar was a pathway to purchasing land. This paper draws on early nineteenth century traders’ account books, nineteenth century travel narratives to Ojibwe territory in the Lake Superior region, and Rush and Jefferson’s promotional material on maple sugar to argue that Ojibwe women and American politicians saw trading in maple sugar as means to competing political goals. For American politicians, investing in maple sugar was a way to strengthen the identity of the young nation by separating itself from slavery and extending its territorial claims. For Ojibwe women, trading in maple sugar was a way to retain their political and economic affluence, allowing them to invest in land and asserting an Ojibwe claim to space in response to the expanding American republic.