An Ojibwe Woman in Washington, D.C.

Abstract

Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, a woman of Ojibwe (Chippewa) and French descent, went to Washington, D.C., for the same reason many Native people had before her: to negotiate a treaty. In Washington, she connected with an intertribal Native community as well as with white suffragists. She grew increasingly politically active as she tried to navigate and then reshape the attitudes of a public who believed that Native people were disappearing and who had trouble understanding her mixed heritage.