Turtle Talk

Here.

Professor Miles, welcome back to the program. Thanks so much for joining us and, of course, congratulations again on the McArthur. And I’d like to ask you, when you first encountered stories of African-Americans and Native American slaves in Michigan, in the Michigan territory. I think it’s a surprise to many people to know or to even think about the fact that slavery existed that far north.

TIYA MILES: Well, I first encountered this when I took a class to the Ypsilanti Historical Museum, and we also took a local Underground Railroad tour. And we learned about an abolitionist here in southeast Michigan named Laura Haviland, who did work in Detroit and also in Ontario.

And she taught a school for escaped slaves in Canada, and there were blacks, as well as native people at that school. So that, for me, was the first clue that there was something between black people and native people in Detroit history regarding slavery, as well as in the Southeast.

MARTIN: Well, what have you been able to piece together about the slave experience in Michigan for both African-Americans and Native Americans? And I realize that the research is in its early stages. I know we want to stress that. But what have you been able to piece together?

MILES: Well, the first thing that strikes me about this research is that Detroit is a very unusual place. It was a major settlement for Native Americans, for French settlers, for British settlers and then later, for the Americans. So that meant that it was an area where lots of people were moving through and passing through.

There was a good deal of contestation over who would get to control Detroit. Would it be the French? Would it be the British? And would it be the Americans? And this meant that slavery also had a multilayered aspect in Detroit.

A little side note: Laura Haviland spent much of her adult life just outside of Adrian, Michigan in Raisin Township, and ran a school there, in addition to being a part of the Underground Railroad. Until 2010, a statute of her sat in front of Adrian City Hall. Put in storage while the old City Hall was demolished, the city is currently thinking about putting it in front of the Adrian Historical Society. Haviland’s papers are held by the University of Michigan, and she wrote her autobiography, A Woman’s Life Work in 1881. One of the first historical projects I ever worked on (including my first trip to an archive to look at her papers) was examining the many different editions Haviland released of A Woman’s Life Work, all with slight changes as she continually rewrote her life’s work.