MINDIMOOYENH, the Ojibwe term for a female elder, best embodies how Ojibwe society has traditionally perceived women’s power. In the Ojibwe language, it literally refers to “one who holds things together” and is a category of distinction that honors the pivotal role occupied by fully mature women in the social order.1 Older women were given unconditional respect. They were recognized for possessing a hard-earned wisdom that derived from firsthand experience with life’s passages: puberty, giving birth, raising children, contending with sickness and disease, and enduring the infirmities or death of parents and other loved ones. Women’s power was an expression of how the Anishinaabeg understood the world they inhabited. In contrast to Europeans, for them, humans were just one small part of a world intensely alive with spiritual power, making it important to respect, accommodate, and maintain kinship with the other living beings that share the earth. Older women, who often had a ceremonial tie and expertise with plants and medicines, had a more finely attuned connection to the earth’s manidoo, or spiritual power. Through their labor and control over certain resources, women continuously renewed relationships to their relatives in the human and spirit world. In day-to-day life, “one who holds things together” was a reference to the economic competence and organizational skill that Ojibwe women, especially grandmothers and those in their maturity, exercised within their families and communities. Far more than merely designating an “old lady,” mindimooyenh—an idea born of women’s autonomy—evokes the status, strength, wisdom, and authority of the older female in Ojibwe society.
The wisdom of elders and the security derived from women’s roles were called on to hold things together as the complex and widespread social disruptions of the reservation era tested the political and communal resources of the Ojibwe people. During the 1830s, politicians and power brokers in the United States focused their attention on indigenous communities of Gichigamiing and the upper Mississippi and began a more concerted effort to remove, consolidate, “civilize,” and negotiate land sales with the Ojibwe. As long as the Ojibwe retained control over their lands and resources, the border between British Canada and the United States had little meaning for them, and local indigenous politics and activities persisted. Each negotiation forged a new problem, and for decades after the middle of the nineteenth century the growing nation-states of Canada and the United States steadily pursued the acquisition of Indian lands. Each treaty forced the Ojibwe to make impossibly difficult decisions, which they understood would influence future generations, yet they remained steadfast in pursuit of their way of life.
For Ojibwe women and their communities, the reservation era produced profound change, which involved adapting the seasonal round to include a variety of informal economic strategies within a world of diminishing resources and increasing poverty. Women adjusted even as they lost access to environments crucial to their livelihood. Federal authorities and missionary organizations launched countless intrusions into family privacy and community life under the banner of assimilation, the process through which indigenous men and women were to be culturally remade in the image of Euro-Americans. Once again, land was the issue, though the discourse of assimilation advocated Indian citizenship and incorporation into the body politic of the United States.
Later in the nineteenth century, when local and state authorities embarked on strategies to violate the legality of reserved treaty rights, the Ojibwe began to carry a new burden, which grew with every denial of the right to use their essential resources—the wild rice, fish, game, maple sugar, and gathered fruits and medicinal plants that ensured their health and survival. Gender roles and carefully crafted work practices of men and women were also vulnerable to the pressures of assimilation and government programs, as customary Euro-American notions of masculine and feminine labor were obsessively promoted among all the indigenous peoples in the United States. Cultural and political sovereignty was obstructed on all fronts. The Ojibwe learned early that politicians and agents of the United States who crossed their homeland posed a real threat to their existence.
One of the early reservation era assaults on the Ojibwe is referred to as the Sandy Lake Tragedy, an event chronicled by Julia Warren Spears and a few others at the time but remembered today by hardly anyone other than the Ojibwe.2 At Sandy Lake, on the Mississippi River in central Minnesota, an episode of ethnic cleansing took place in the mid-nineteenth century when the United States attempted to remove Ojibwe from their homelands in the newly established state of Wisconsin to Minnesota Territory. One hundred seventy Ojibwe died at Sandy Lake, and 230 more succumbed on the long walk home to Wisconsin and Michigan. The devastation resulted in a population loss of about 12 percent among Wisconsin Ojibwe at mid-century. Those estimated four hundred deaths do not take into account the Minnesota Mississippi bands of Ojibwe who perished as they traveled home from Sandy Lake, stories of which were written down by missionaries at Leech Lake. More Ojibwe people died as a direct result of the atrocity at Sandy Lake than the estimated two hundred Cheyenne massacred at Sand Creek or the three hundred Lakota slaughtered at Wounded Knee.
The governor of the newly organized Minnesota Territory, Alexander Ramsey, had a particularly intimate role in the removal plan and the incidents that unfolded at Sandy Lake during the early winter of 1850. In that year, Ramsey chose Sandy Lake, the home of some Ojibwe communities, as the site of a new Indian agency to replace the one at Madeline Island. A son of political patronage, Ramsey favored the development of a Northern Indian Territory, one that fell within his jurisdiction, with all the associated government funding opportunities and Indian annuities. He collaborated with John S. Watrous, a La Pointe trader of questionable reputation who was appointed special agent for removal in 1850, on a furtive plan to remove the Ojibwe from their Wisconsin homelands. Their deception was essentially to set a trap for removal by calling Ojibwe families to Sandy Lake for an annuity payment, then to detain them in the Minnesota Territory as they waited for the annuities to arrive. If the payments arrived late in the season, it would mean that the Wisconsin Ojibwe would be unable to travel home when waterways froze.
Ramsey was deeply involved, both politically and financially, in the development of the region. The treaties negotiated in Anishinaabewaki in 1837 and 1842 involved land cessions in the western Wisconsin and Minnesota Territories, in addition to exchanges of goods, annuities, the payment of debts to traders, and a compromise that established the preservation of significant rights to continue Ojibwe economic lifeways over the land. In the fall of 1849, Ramsey and the Minnesota Territorial Legislative Assembly collaborated to invalidate portions of the 1837 and 1842 treaties with the Lake Superior Ojibwe and called for their removal based on false and unsubstantiated claims of “depredations” against white settlers. In fact, these claims were made at a time when the Ojibwe argued that violence and theft toward them by lumbermen, settlers, and other new immigrants went unpunished and even uninvestigated by Minnesota authorities. Governor Ramsey followed up the actions of the assembly with a visit to Washington, intended to convince President Zachary Taylor of the necessity for Ojibwe removal to Minnesota. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Orlando Brown approved the plan. At a moment when traders and local economies were very reliant on Ojibwe annuities and income, the location of where the payments were made was very important. Henry Rice, a trader and Minnesota politician who had much to gain from moving the Ojibwe payment to Minnesota Territory, was also an advocate for the removal. He wrote to Ramsey:
They should receive their annuities on the Mississippi River, say at or near Sandy Lake, at which place an agency for the whole tribe should be established. This would better accommodate the whole tribe and Minnesota would reap the benefit whereas now their annuities pass via Detroit and not one dollar do our inhabitants get altho’ we are subject to all the annoyance given by those Indians.3
From the standpoint of Minnesota Territory politicians, the issues of Ojibwe removal from Wisconsin and the relocation of the site of annuity payments from La Pointe, on Madeline Island, to Minnesota were closely intertwined. On February 6, 1850, President Taylor issued an executive order that overstepped his authority by revoking the reserved rights to hunt, fish, and gather for which Ojibwe leaders had so judiciously negotiated when they ceded territory under the treaties of 1837 and 1842 and signed an agreement with the United States. The 1850 executive order also called for the removal of “all said Indians remaining on the lands ceded.”4 The Lake Superior Ojibwe uniformly opposed the Removal Order of 1850, which required thousands of people to leave their ancestral homelands and travel hundreds of miles to the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota, thereby intruding on the lands of other Ojibwe people. It was an inconceivable proposition. Past assurances to the Ojibwe that they would remain on the land for many years, perhaps 150, or until the present generation had passed away, and that annuities would be regularly paid to them, meant little to federal and territorial authorities, who turned against the promises made by their own government by threatening the withdrawal of annuities if the Ojibwe failed to remove.
Faced with little choice, many Wisconsin Ojibwe came to Sandy Lake for the annuity payment in the autumn of 1850, traveling several hundred miles by land and water and arriving in late October. Julia Warren Spears described the hard journey that many Ojibwe from Wisconsin undertook. She went to Sandy Lake with her brother, William W. Warren, who was already suffering the effects of tuberculosis, in the event that he became sick during the trip. He survived but would die just three years after Sandy Lake.
The account by Julia Warren Spears is significant for its detail regarding how the Ojibwe sustained themselves during a long journey, by carrying with them wild rice, flour, and pork and by hunting along the way. It also describes the food shortages and dire circumstances the travelers soon faced at the government’s temporary annuity camp at Sandy Lake. Spears recalled traveling up the Chippewa River to Lac Courte Oreilles, where her party picked up a group of Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe, and the “next day we started on our journey through the woods.” She continued:
The Indians packing their canoes, they all had packs of some kind on their backs. We had to walk nearly all day. We came to a lake and camped for the night. Our tent was put up, with branches of spruce and cedar spread on the ground in the inside, which made it quite comfortable. In front outside of the tent, a small fire, where I cooked our evening meal. The Indians built several large camp fires, fixed places to hang their kettles over the fire, to cook their evening meal, which was large kettles of wild rice and flour soup, water thickened with flour seasoned with pork. It was always their evening meal, as it took a short time to cook. On each side of the fire they stick small poles to hang long rush mats for a covering where they slept. A number of them were hunting through the woods as we traveled along. They killed all kinds of game such as deer, geese, ducks, and other game. Some of them would cook by the fire nearly all night, game they had killed during the day, and cooking legalet, bread made with salt, water, and flour, kneaded quite hard in round flat loaves fastened on stick and placed before the fire.5
Spears, William W. Warren, and the growing party of travelers crossed many rivers and lakes before reaching the St. Croix River, where they waited several days for the Pokegama and St. Croix Ojibwe to arrive. Once joined together, the parties moved on toward Lake Superior and canoed down a treacherous stretch of the Iron River, which, despite its many obstacles and rapids, the expert Ojibwe traversed with ease. By the time they reached the present site of Duluth, there were seven hundred Ojibwe from Wisconsin camped. The Ojibwe travelers went on to Fond du Lac and crossed “a three day portage” to Sandy Lake before their three-week journey ended. It was an exhausting trip, Spears recalled, but when they crossed Sandy Lake to arrive at the agency, “all the Mississippi Bands of Chippewas and Leach [sic] Lake Indians with their families were all there, waiting for the payment.”6
Thousands of Ojibwe arrived at Sandy Lake in time for the annuity payment to be held, on October 25, 1850. The unusually large convergence of Ojibwe in north-central Minnesota coincided with a year of food shortages for the bands near Sandy Lake on the Mississippi River. That fall the local wild rice crop had failed because of flooding on the Mississippi, and fishing had also been poor. With food in short supply for those gathered, the situation worsened when Indian agent John S. Watrous failed to arrive at Sandy Lake on the date when he was supposed to deliver the annuities. The provisions of food that had been promised were also delayed. Weeks passed without the payment, and soon winter set in. The Ojibwe waited and waited. For sustenance they were forced to rely on the food supplied by the government, mostly flour and salt pork, but what arrived turned out to be moldy, spoiled, and unfit for consumption, leading to widespread hunger and sickness.
During a six-week interval in the early winter of 1850, approximately 170 of the estimated 4,000 Ojibwe people assembled at Sandy Lake died. Watrous finally arrived and completed the annuity payments on December 3, 1850. After weeks of meager and contaminated food, illness, and death, the Wisconsin Ojibwe left Sandy Lake; but now, already weakened, they faced grueling winter weather. On the trip back home to Wisconsin and upper Michigan through deep snow and bitter cold, an estimated 230 more Ojibwe lost their lives. Travelers abandoned their canoes when the waterways froze, and survivors walked home, sometimes crossing hundreds of miles.
Approximately 1,500 Ojibwe from northern Minnesota—Leech Lake and other communities—had also attended the annuity payment, and some of their number also perished after leaving Sandy Lake. Their bleak return journey was similar to the harrowing events in Wisconsin, when Ojibwe who had already experienced deprivation at Sandy Lake contracted dysentery and other diseases, with many never making it to their destination. It is not clear how many deaths from northern Minnesota were counted, or if any at all were included, in the 400 estimated by the Lake Superior headmen shortly after the event.
A missionary’s wife in northern Minnesota described how the Ojibwe at Leech Lake remembered Sandy Lake as “the burying-place of their friends” and related appalling stories of hunger, sickness, and suffering. She learned of a brother and sister from Cass Lake who were returning home in the deep winter when the brother took sick shortly after leaving Sandy Lake and subsequently died halfway to Leech Lake. The sister refused to leave her brother’s body in the snow and waited two days for another group to come by and assist her with his burial. Stories of the Mississippi Ojibwe from northern Minnesota suggest that women and families traveled to the annuity payment debacle at Sandy Lake, not just men. The missionary’s wife told of her close neighbors, another Ojibwe family who had been at Sandy Lake and intended to return to Leech Lake. The husband and wife reached home but carried with them their two young deceased children. She related their somber story:
This family consisting of a man and his wife, two children, and his wife’s brother, started from Sandy Lake in health, with food enough for their journey, if they had not been detained on their way. About half-way from Sandy Lake to Leech Lake, the wife’s brother was taken sick, and detained them several days, when he died; they buried him and came on. Three days’ march from Leech Lake, the two children were taken sick, the oldest a boy of twelve years old (who, by the way, was the best boy we have known in the country, a member of our school, one we had hoped to educate), the other a girl two years old. At this time their food was all gone. The father was obliged to carry his sick son, and the mother the daughter, until the last night before they reached Leech Lake, when the boy died. The next morning they set off again, the father carrying the corpse of his son, and the mother a sick child. About noon the girl died, but they came on until they reached Leech Lake, bringing the dead bodies of their children on their backs.7
Government reports downplayed the atrocities at Sandy Lake—Governor Ramsey characterized the Ojibwe people’s claims as “highly exaggerated”—or blamed the high number of deaths simply on disease.8 Yet Ojibwe leaders who were present at Sandy Lake continued to speak out regarding the cruelty and disregard for humanity their people had experienced. Bagone-giizhig, the Mississippi leader from Gull Lake known as Hole in the Day, gave a speech in St. Paul describing the spoiled food and moldy flour the Ojibwe were given, which caused the initial sickness, and the long days and nights at Sandy Lake during which five or more people expired on a daily basis. Eventually he concluded that “the more treaties we make the more miserable we become.”9
After the events of Sandy Lake, Ojibwe people were increasingly convinced that federal and territorial authorities desired their removal or, worse, their extermination. Eshkibagikoozhe, or Flat Mouth, the Mississippi leader from Leech Lake, had also been at Sandy Lake and was unequivocal that the events were not the result of accident. He placed blame directly in the hands of Alexander Ramsey. “I lay it all to him,” said Flat Mouth, in a mocking reference to “our Great Father the Governor,” who was responsible for making his people suffer “by sickness, by death, by hunger and cold.” Flat Mouth reproached Ramsey for making the Ojibwe attend the payment during the essential hunting and fishing season and said, “If we had remained at home we should have been far better off than we are now with our scanty annuity.” While at Sandy Lake, the Ojibwe had been promised food and provisions, yet ultimately they “had to depend upon the charity of our fellow Indians.” Flat Mouth relayed to Ramsey a firm message of culpability: “Tell him I blame him for the children we have lost, for the sickness we have suffered and for the hunger we have endured.”10
Ojibwe people have never forgotten Sandy Lake. A woman from the Sandy Lake region of Minnesota, Mrs. George Curtis, daughter of an Ojibwe leader from the area, shared her family’s memory during the 1920s. Even though her words were recorded decades later, they were eerily similar to the observations, shortly after the events, of William W. Warren, who related the sentiments of Wisconsin Ojibwe who felt the United States planned “to poison them off, to hurry their removal from Wisconsin.”11 Such feelings cannot help but seem validated in the face of historical evidence, which overwhelmingly demonstrates that Sandy Lake, regardless of the role played by bureaucratic neglect, was not an accident. In the aftermath, Ojibwe leaders expressed clearly their conviction that the government plan was removal, regardless of the cost to human life.12
Deaths from starvation, sickness, exposure, and other suffering that transpired during the winter of 1850 had catastrophic consequences for Ojibwe women, families, and community life, though perhaps a greater number of men than women or children died. Some distant Ojibwe communities that refused to come to Sandy Lake so late in the season were spared, including the L’Anse, Ontonagon, Pelican Lake, and Lac Vieux Desert. A few Wisconsin Ojibwe communities prudently sent only their men, even though the government intentionally asked that families come for the annuities, believing that removal would succeed only if families were present at Sandy Lake. Mississippi Ojibwe communities and others closer to Sandy Lake appear to have traveled with their families. Historians believe that one-third of the Lake Superior Ojibwe’s most able-bodied male hunters and fishermen, and female workers in the traditional economy, died as a direct result of the inhumanity that unraveled at Sandy Lake. Starvation and disease disproportionately killed people in the prime of life, and the consequences would reverberate in the Ojibwe population for years to come.13
In the aftermath, twenty-eight Lake Superior head chiefs signed a document that described the agent’s deception and testified to their trauma and that estimated the number of total dead among their people at four hundred. They explained:
When we left for home, we saw the ground covered with the graves of our children and relatives. One hundred and seventy had died during the payment. Many too, of our young men and women fell by the way and when we had reached home and made a careful estimate of our loss of life, we found that two hundred and thirty more had died on our way home. 14
The devastating events of Sandy Lake lingered in the historical memory of the Ojibwe people and their leaders in the years after 1850, coloring all future negotiation with the U.S. government. Ramsey, Watrous, and other government officials had proven not simply untrustworthy but capable of a callous disregard toward human life. Ojibwe leaders, forced to deal with Watrous the following year and still challenged with removal, stated, “At the next council, we told him [Watrous] we wanted our last year’s payment, that our children were cold and we had not money to buy them clothing.”15 In 1851 the L’Anse Ojibwe made formal charges against Watrous that included “broken promises and daily deception,” unethical conduct stemming from “a practice of seducing and cohabiting with our women,” and attempting to create his own chiefs and leaders through bribery, which has “broken up the civil polity of our tribe.”16 Frustrated over removal and with receiving little response to their letters and petitions, an Ojibwe delegation traveled to Washington in the spring of 1852, led by the distinguished leader of the Lake Superior headmen, Bizhiki, Chief Buffalo of La Pointe.
Though Bizhiki was more than ninety years of age and the oldest of the Lake Superior leaders, he was eager to travel to Washington, “just as soon as my canoe will float on the Lake in the Spring.”17 By canoe, steamboat, and rail, the delegation made the two-month journey, the first leg of which Bizhiki and the Ojibwe spent gathering signatures of support from miners and other non-Indian residents along southern Lake Superior.
It is not certain whether Bizhiki ever had his audience with President Millard Fillmore while in Washington, but in some ways the first stage of his journey was the more interesting. During his travels, he successfully gathered the support of many settlers and non-Indian citizens who were convinced that it was in their own best interest for the Ojibwe to remain in their homelands of Wisconsin and Minnesota. These settlers had arrived after the busiest years of the fur trade, and in many ways they interacted with indigenous residents like the early generation of traders: they cultivated relationships of exchange. The development of mining along the south shore of Lake Superior in the mid-nineteenth century had encouraged Ojibwe communities in the region to increase their farming labor. They then sold surplus vegetables to the growing population of miners. The food Ojibwe women gathered—especially their surplus of wild rice, berries, and maple sugar—was another mainstay for the settlers, who also relied on the women for clothing and moccasins. Ojibwe women and their communities had proven to be excellent neighbors and essential contributors to the growth and development of the regional economy, and new settlers were not eager for them to go west.
In a written statement presented to President Fillmore and other Indian Affairs officials, Bizhiki chose a simple yet powerful woodland metaphor to argue for the Ojibwe right to sovereignty and their homelands. First, he commented on the traumatic Sandy Lake events, the suffering and unnecessary Ojibwe deaths that resulted, and the promises that had been made to his people during negotiations over the Treaty of La Pointe in 1842. The elderly and exceptionally well-spoken Bizhiki delivered his message through imagery that he believed the president would easily grasp. He challenged Washington by offering a new paradigm for Indian-American interaction, one in which harmonious relations might exist, and he urged sensible behavior in the American settlement of his people’s homelands. He suggested this example: when white men enter a new country and decide on a place to settle, they might choose to cut away the brush and bad trees so that the ground can be leveled. At the same time, he reasoned, good, healthy trees would never be cut down. Bizhiki urged the president to consider the Ojibwe the same as “the good trees,” which should be allowed “to stand and live.”18
Shortly after Chief Buffalo’s delegation visited Washington, a change in administration and Indian Affairs shifted federal policy away from removal to concentration on reservations. Beginning in 1854, the hard work of petitioning for reservations on their homelands in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota began to yield results for the Ojibwe. They were supported by a large contingent of non-Indian citizens in Wisconsin and Michigan who joined the lobby to end the removal. Great Lakes–area newspapers were also highly critical of Washington and supportive of the need for permanent reservations.19 A refocused Indian policy in Washington, led by Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny, resulted in new treaties, the establishment of reservation lands, and a shift toward education for “civilization,” rather than the concept of total removal that had dominated since the Jacksonian years.20 The new Treaty of La Pointe, in 1854, officially organized Ojibwe of the Lake Superior or the Mississippi Band, though some communities were left out of the negotiation. The treaty also created Ojibwe reservations. As a consequence, Ojibwe bands on Lake Superior and in the interior of Wisconsin, including some on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, were designated as Lake Superior Ojibwe and received reservations at L’Anse, Ontonagon, Lac Vieux Desert, La Pointe, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac du Flambeau, Grand Portage, Fond du Lac, and Bois Forte.
As part of the “civilization” policy favored by Manypenny, Ojibwe land tenure practices wherein women held usufruct rights to maple sugar groves and wild rice waterways were disregarded in favor of western notions of private property, and tribes were forced to cede crucial landscapes. The Detroit Treaty of 1855 failed to protect the rights of the Ojibwe to interests in their important Sault rapids fishery and also introduced a private property allotment scheme for Ojibwe and Ottawa descendants of participants in an earlier treaty of 1836. Leaders of six Sault bands, including Canadian Garden River Ojibwe, took part in the Detroit treaties and negotiated for small, permanent places of residence in their homelands. Ojibwe in Michigan had owned all of the Upper Peninsula prior to the Treaty of 1820 but lost millions of acres in 1836. The Detroit Treaty of 1855 was not the agreement they had hoped for, yet Ojibwe persistence in its aftermath allowed for their continuing presence in northern Michigan.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ojibwe people firmly controlled the upper Mississippi, but during the territorial years, from 1849 to 1858, immigration and westward expansion turned Minnesota into one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. In 1850, American Indians were still the majority population in Minnesota Territory, but during the next decade they were overrun in numbers by a settler society, with a new state and constituents increasingly bent on exploiting the forests of the northern Great Lakes region.21 The 1855 Treaty of Washington, led by Commissioner Manypenny in Washington and Henry Rice in Minnesota, negotiated with several delegations of Mississippi, Pillager, and Lake Winnibigoshish leaders, led by Bagone-giizhig from Gull Lake and Flat Mouth from Leech Lake. The treaty acquired an enormous land cession from Ojibwe in northern Minnesota for the United States and entailed substantial payments, as well as annuities and goods, for the Ojibwe for a period of thirty years, in addition to the establishment of reservations. Ojibwe treaty rights over ceded lands had already been affirmed in 1837, 1842, and 1854, prior to the 1855 negotiation. Red Lake leaders negotiated treaties of land cession in 1863 and 1864 but never relocated from their homeland.
The goal of further concentration on northern reservations fueled U.S. government Indian policy in Minnesota during the 1860s, despite Ojibwe objections. The Treaty of 1867 created a large reservation in northern Minnesota, White Earth, intended as a new homeland for all the Minnesota Ojibwe, though one leader protested that his people would “die first in our old homes” rather than agree to removal.22 In the atmosphere of Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy,” various religious organizations grew in influence on the new reservations, and at White Earth missionaries linked masculine agricultural practice with Christianity. White Earth Ojibwe increased their farming while maintaining as long as possible communal practices associated with the traditional seasonal economy.23
The White Earth Reservation encompassed farmlands, wild rice lakes, and forests and was a place where policymakers envisioned that relocated Ojibwe would come together to live as settled farmers, embracing Christianity and education. White Earth became the center of a statewide effort to consolidate and privatize land through allotment among the Ojibwe who lived within the borders of Minnesota. A number of Madeleine Cadotte’s grandchildren, including Julia Warren Spears and Mary Warren English, arrived at White Earth during the removals of 1868–70, shortly after the creation of the reservation. Like their family, a number of other people in the community were of mixed Ojibwe and Euro-American ancestry, including the Beaulieu, Morrison, and Fairbanks families. Truman Warren, another Warren sibling, was hired as overseer by the United States for the first Ojibwe removals from Crow Wing and Gull Lake to White Earth. By 1876, hundreds of Ojibwe from northern Minnesota and Wisconsin had come to White Earth, in addition to many Pembina Ojibwe from the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota.
The 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act in the United States spearheaded a nationwide effort to assimilate Indians into the mainstream of American society by promoting Christianity, education in off-reservation boarding schools for children, and the privatization of reservation land. In Minnesota, land allotment was given additional impetus by the 1889 Nelson Act. This legislation turned political attention to the twelve Ojibwe reservations in the north, as consolidation and allotment at White Earth were viewed as the statewide solution to the “Indian Problem.” Policymakers, missionaries, and other reformers promoted the idea that private ownership of land, agricultural labor, and Christian values would lead Indians to progress, citizenship, and salvation. At a time in the United States when some national leaders favored extinguishing all native claims to land—and in Minnesota where, in the aftermath of the War of 1862, the Dakota had been executed, imprisoned, or exiled from their homeland—many non-Indians elevated allotment and assimilation as nothing short of humanitarian policies.
Few reservations escaped allotment. One notable exception was that of the Red Lake community, in far northern Minnesota. Me-dweganoonind, at more than eighty years of age the elder spokesman among seven hereditary chiefs who represented the doodem at Red Lake, expressed his view of the flawed and potentially damaging land allotment policy in 1889. “I will never consent to the allotment plan,” he said. “I wish to lay out a reservation here, where we can remain with our bands forever.” His word held in the face of government pressure, furthering Red Lake’s lasting reputation as an autonomous community, even among the Ojibwe.24 The reservation’s sovereignty came at the expense of a portion of its country: nearly three million acres of land was lost at Red Lake in 1889. But thousands of acres of land and water from their homeland were organized into a large reservation, where a communal system of land tenure continued, making it one of only a handful of U.S. reservations to avoid allotment. In 1918, the band adopted a constitutional form of tribal government that assembled a tribal council with a significant continuing leadership role for Red Lake’s seven hereditary chiefs, following the older clan lines of the doodemag.
Most reservations would not be so fortunate. The Ojibwe experienced relentless attacks on their land and sovereignty as the reinvigorated assimilation campaign gathered strength in the late nineteenth century. While close to two thousand Ojibwe lived at White Earth at the turn of the century, others on northern Minnesota reservations resisted removal efforts, and many took allotments on their homelands, an option stipulated in the 1889 Nelson Act. In addition to Red Lake, the Mille Lacs Ojibwe people of central Minnesota were notably opposed to removal, despite the fact that their treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather over ceded lands were increasingly being denied them and local law enforcement chose violence and harassment of the band rather than providing their legal protection. Washington resorted to an old tactic with Mille Lacs, the withholding of their annuities, but the Ojibwe maintained their right to stay in their homeland under the terms of the Treaty of 1863. Ojibwe resistance and the people’s intense economic and spiritual bonds with landscapes of home meant that the White Earth consolidation plan never lived up to the expectations of Minnesota politicians and that Ojibwe community life persisted at Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, Grand Portage, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, and Red Lake.
For tribes across the United States, the results of allotment policies and withdrawal of the protective trust relationship were economically and culturally devastating, as millions of acres passed out of Indian ownership. The Ojibwe could not avoid the environmental destruction and dispossession unleashed in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the early twentieth century. Land fraud was rampant, corruption in Indian Affairs continued unchecked, and the hollow interests of environmentally unsustainable timber companies dominated the political landscape of the northern Great Lakes region. Rather than serving as an example of Indian progress and enlightened government policy, White Earth became a national model of human suffering and environmental exploitation. By 1920 gigantic red and white pine in the once verdant tribal forest were cut-over and most of the reservation land was owned by non-Indians, taken from its indigenous owners through force or deception. Josephine Robinson described her mother’s experience with the corruption that accompanied dispossession at White Earth as unscrupulous speculators singled out elderly Ojibwe for exploitation.
I remember it was 1906. The land sharks around here got land any way they could. My mother told me how she put down her thumbprint on a piece of paper. She couldn’t write. She couldn’t speak English. She was a full blood. She wasn’t supposed to be able to sell her land, according to the law. People didn’t know what they were putting their thumbprints down for. Some thought they were renting their land.25
Kate Frost, a Grand Portage Ojibwe elder, had her valuable allotment of land along the scenic north shore of Lake Superior stolen. A medicine woman who spoke Ojibwe, Frost lived in Chippewa City, near Grand Marais, Minnesota, with her grandson James Wipson (born in 1918), whom she raised for his first ten years with few resources other than what she gained from the land. Mrs. Frost suffered from arthritis, and on many days her grandson stayed home from school to help her during bouts of illness. He recalled the contentment of life with his grandmother, as well as the difficulties they faced together.
Grand Marais was very prejudiced against the Indians. When my grandmother would take me to Grand Marais we’d walk a mile. She wanted to just get a few necessities in the grocery store. Them people wouldn’t talk to us. They wouldn’t pay no attention. The only one that paid attention to her was the one who was trying to get our land. Say, “Hi Katie. You need groceries?”26
Frost was defrauded of her land on the north shore. The friendly storekeeper who gave her flour, sugar, and salt pork was quietly paying her taxes in exchange for her “X” on a piece of paper, and the elderly woman unwittingly signed away her property, effective upon her death. The land shark, recalled her grandson, “confiscated all our land in Chippewa City,” which sat on a “beautiful bay,” while defrauding other Ojibwe as well.27
Yet even as the government forced new community organization and lifestyle changes on the Ojibwe, Frost and other women like her continued to hold things together. The deeply ingrained traditions of women’s lives served as a rock that stood proudly against the winds of change and helped to sustain family and community life in the face of racial hatred, exploitation, and a desolate reservation economy of the post-allotment Great Lakes region. Women’s seasonal ricing in early fall, maple sugar harvesting in spring, and berry picking in summer had even more significance to households once state game laws inhibited Ojibwe access to hunting and fishing. The Ojibwe faced arrest and relentless harassment by game wardens by the turn of the century, despite prior agreements made in good faith as the Ojibwe ceded millions of acres to the federal government. In 1897, two elderly male hunters, one seventy-two and the other eighty-eight and blind, were arrested for possessing venison in violation of state game laws and were incarcerated for four months in Iron County, Wisconsin.28 State-sanctioned interventions onto tribal homelands and resources intensified in the post-allotment years, though men predominantly faced unjust arrest, harassment, fines, and jail terms for trespassing and violations of fish and game laws. In the case of the Iron County imprisonments, the elderly wife of one of the hunters was not jailed, yet finding her way home alone to the Lac du Flambeau Reservation with the added stress of her husband’s incarceration was a cruel hardship. Ojibwe who simply hunted and gathered to make a living, exercising their legal treaty rights, had to live in fear.
In 1894, Chief Giishkitawag, or Cut-ear, who was known in English as Joe White, was murdered by a local law officer in Washburn County, Wisconsin, after he was arrested by a game warden for hunting deer out of season on Ojibwe ceded lands. The Ojibwe in northern Wisconsin had negotiated three treaties during the course of the nineteenth century that guaranteed and reserved their rights to hunt, fish, and gather over the homelands they had ceded. Nonetheless, White was arrested and the game warden struck him on the head. As he began to flee, an officer who accompanied the warden shot him from thirty yards away, and he died that day. In the spring of 1895 an all-white jury in Washburn County found the game warden and the law officer innocent of the murder of Joe White. State game laws upheld the authority, lifestyles, and desires of white, middle-class sportsmen and tourists, not those of Ojibwe families who relied on a seasonal round.29
Lake Superior and the Mississippi River region was a shifting environmental landscape in the early twentieth century, a fact reflected in the contrasting memories of place from one generation of Ojibwe people to the next. Maude Kegg recalled her girlhood experiences with the Ojibwe seasonal economy as it was practiced near Portage Lake, in central Minnesota, where she was born on the Mille Lacs Reservation around 1904. Kegg’s grandmother Margaret Pine taught her to fish, make maple sugar, and harvest wild rice and wild fruits. Pine and other women and children sold blueberries to wholesalers, participating in the broader cash economy as an antidote to poverty. Cutover forests in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were vulnerable to intense fires, yet remarkably these artificial conditions of regeneration gave rise to abundant crops of blueberries. Kegg and her grandmother sold their blueberries in Brainerd, a nearby non-Indian town, and fish to a wholesaler in Vineland. The northern landscape of Maude Kegg’s girlhood was not the same as her grandmother’s, deforested and reshaped as it was by the exertions of timber companies. Pine could recall a time when “there were so many pines that it was dark” near shimmering Lake Mille Lacs, though Kegg herself remembered the abundance of blueberries and a large logging camp that employed a number of Ojibwe laborers.30
Northern Wisconsin and upper Michigan were also locations for seasonal berry picking, which grew into a significant remunerative occupation in the wake of timbering, as pine forests gave way to fires that swept through and allowed for the growth of blueberries “so large and thick that it was impossible to avoid stepping on them,” according to one berry picker.31 At an active campsite on Keweenaw Point, Michigan, Ojibwe women and their families worked “burnt over” lands that now held lush berry fields. They would sell the berries “in a house-to-house canvas,” providing food to Michigan’s booming copper industry, then head back to pick more that would be used “for home consumption during the winter.” One picker remembered:
Next morning we started out for the blueberry fields, which were about a mile or so from the camping grounds. And berries: this is one time I beheld blueberries growing on stems four to six inches long, in clusters like grapes.
Three of us, my mother, a younger sister, and myself, picked over a hundred quarts in a few hours that day. I remember that I picked a pack-box full and also a large pail full myself. The capacity of a pack-box at that time was from thirty to forty quarts; and a pail, the standard measure used in the sale of blueberries, contained ten quarts.32
Even after land loss, timbering, and forest fires, Ojibwe people sustained a way of life in the Great Lakes region that carefully balanced an economy of seasonally changing work sites and complementary labor for men and women. As important as wild rice was to their cycle of seasonal occupations, perfectly described by Nodinens in the early twentieth century as “very systematic,” the Ojibwe never relied on this resource alone and always kept in mind the possibility of coming hardship or misfortune.33 Female collectives organized the labor of harvesting wild rice and maple sugar, and smaller working units of women and children turned blueberry gathering into a viable source of income.
By the 1920s, Ojibwe workers in the Great Lakes had added another type of seasonal work to their annual cycle: participating in the tourist economy. Ojibwe labor was at the center of a new economy in a developing recreation landscape. Small businesses attracted indigenous laborers from reservations, who earned income near their homes and communities. Ojibwe workers in northern Wisconsin found summer employment at vacation spots like Cardinal’s Resort, the Ojibwa Lodge, and Hill’s Resort near the Lac du Flambeau Reservation, a community that developed an early appreciation for the rewards of tourism. Labor was gendered: women and teenagers cooked, cleaned, and did laundry, while men worked as hunting and fishing guides. Women workers also supported tourism in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota by supplying fresh berries and food for summer vacationers, in addition to manufacturing and selling crafts and handiwork large and small, from miniature beadwork trinkets to elaborate birch-bark and porcupine-quill baskets. Husband and wife entrepreneurs Benedict and Margaret Gauthier were the proprietors of the Gauthier resort on Long Lake, Lac du Flambeau’s successful “modern summer hotel and cottages.”34 Sisters Bessie Stone Fisher and Sarah Stone Gilham rented out their two-story home on Fence Lake to summer visitors from Milwaukee.35 Twenty-year-old Margaret Snow worked seasonally at the Ojibwa Lodge but in winter found time for making beadwork and moccasins before heading to the sugar bush in the spring.36
Married couples living on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in the 1920s actively participated in the growing tourist economy but maintained a division of labor within a seasonal cycle not unlike that of the previous generation. Men still crafted canoes and snowshoes in addition to hunting, trapping, and fishing, while women continued to pick and can berries, make maple sugar and syrup, and gather and process wild rice. Lizzie Young, a Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe, had a husband who worked as a summer guide while she “made moccasins, bead work, sugar, syrup, pick[ed] and can[ned] wild berries.”37 This combination of indigenous seasonal activities and wages from tourist work allowed families to purchase pianos, sewing machines, or “graphaphones.” In a few instances, Ojibwe men gathered wild rice as part of their livelihood, though this probably indicated that they traveled with women to the work site and helped their family set up wild rice camp during the season.38 Making maple syrup and sugar was also women’s work, but some Ojibwe men, such as Bob Pine of Lac du Flambeau, assisted their wives.39 During the 1920s, most married couples had children who attended boarding schools or local public schools; this may have reduced the number of available hands in the sugar bush, making men more likely to participate. The labor of harvesting maple sugar may have been more compatible with a local economy increasingly geared toward tourism, since more Lac du Flambeau women went to the early spring sugar bush than gathered wild rice in late summer.40
Whenever it was in the best interest of their families, women workers supplemented their normal collective patterns of labor by engaging in a variety of practices more typical of men. Widowed and divorced women who worked in reservation communities during the 1920s faced a particular set of challenges as kin networks destabilized under pressure from high rates of disease and death.41 To earn a living, many women without partners hunted and fished, in addition to raising children and grandchildren. Helen Skye, a boarding school student at Lac du Flambeau, was supported by her grandmother through a variety of sources; even at age sixty-six, Skye’s grandmother was an active hunter and trapper. Similarly, the widowed Margaret Brown gathered wild rice and also worked “like a man,” according to a non-Indian observer, by hunting, trapping, and fishing, in addition to being the sole caretaker of a mentally disabled son. Mrs. Catfish, a great-grandmother, tanned hides at seventy-eight. Mattice Scott, a successful midwife with four grown children, practiced the seasonal round, in addition to crafting woven bags and reed mats and tanning hides. Perhaps to ease her burden or as a testimony to her zest for life, Scott became a new bride at age sixty-four, marrying John Batiste, her Potawatomi groom.
That women on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation hunted and fished when men were unavailable suggests that tradition did not prevail over practical concerns in the gendered division of labor. In the Ojibwe WPA narratives from the 1930s, writer Florina Denomie compiled the story of a woman from Keweenaw Bay, on Lake Superior, whom she described as “An Indian Huntress.” With her grandmother’s approval the huntress tracked and killed her first animal, a porcupine. Elder female relatives celebrated the event, and her grandmother’s response was pride: “My girl, we will have a feast.” Later, the girl tracked and killed a deer, after an uncle taught her to shoot and carry a gun. As an adult, she still wore a blouse at dances made of the tanned hide from her first deer.
One day I went out deer hunting. I was not far from home, having been gone only about an hour, when I saw tiny hole tracks in the snow. Examining them closely, I came to the conclusion that they must be deer tracks, and I became excited and began to shiver. (In the hunter’s vocabulary this is called “buck-fever.”) I thought, “this will never do,” and I continued in my quest for deer. I became very tired, hardly being able to lift my feet out of the snow. Finally, I tracked the deer through a small swamp. The tracks were getting fresher and my feet were getting heavier; but I managed to step over a windfall, and just as I got one foot over, up came something with a white flash in front of me, and another and another—three in all. I raised my gun and fired about a foot of the first flash, and it went up in the air and down. (It might be well to explain that the flashes were the whites of deer tails.) I took aim at the next one, but missed. I concluded that they were all gone, and that I had missed in both shots. I thought I would go and see what I did in the first shot anyway. Imagine my surprise to find that I had succeeded in bringing down a small spiked horn buck. There it lay, with such a pleading look in its eyes, that I turned away in sorrow and tears, and while the little deer had won my complete sympathy, it was necessary for me to complete the kill.42
Ojibwe women re-formed their families, communities, and work habits and some of their social practices to cope with dispossession and the loss of resources on the reservation. Sometimes this involved embracing cultural changes, new identities, and different worldviews. Catholic and Episcopal missionaries continued to proselytize in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and the reservation era produced the first generation of Ojibwe clergy. Enmegahbowh, or John Johnson, an Ojibwe Episcopalian clergyman, traveled with Ojibwe to White Earth, settled on the reservation, and was the first American Indian minister of the Episcopal Church. The Benedictine order of the Catholic Church operated a boarding school for girls at White Earth and a mission and school on the Red Lake Reservation. Catholic and Episcopal missionaries worked throughout reservations in the Great Lakes, along with other Christian organizations, which relied on the skills of a bilingual clergy. In Wisconsin in 1913, Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Philip Gordon became the first native person in North America to be ordained a Catholic priest. Five years later, he returned to Lac Courte Oreilles to lead the St. Francis Indian Mission. The Methodist Church was an important part of life in northern Michigan, and the Ojibwe minister Peter Marksman established the Naomikong Mission and school on Lake Superior. Part of the church’s landholding was purchased by the United States to become the Bay Mills Indian Reservation.43
The Episcopal Ojibwe at White Earth “encouraged women to take a prominent role in community-rebuilding efforts” through their establishment of the Women’s Meeting, which addressed issues related to changes in household economies and work, in addition to promoting Christian prayers and songs. The healing rituals the Episcopal women at White Earth adapted, though conducted with Christian prayer, markedly resembled those of the Midewiwin society.44 Suzanna Wright Roy, or Equaymedogay, was the daughter of Waabojiig of Gull Lake and an early convert to the Episcopalian Church who became a Christian leader at White Earth. Scholar Michael McNally argues that, even though the women’s societies were “clearly promoted to do the work of gendered cultural assimilation” and “Native women were implored to sew and cook rather than fish, rice, and gather wood,” they nevertheless may have served an “energizing” role for Ojibwe women in the public life of a reservation community.45
While Ojibwe religious practices may have been disrupted by the introduction of Christianity, the ceremonies and philosophy of the Midewiwin, the leading religious and healing society for the Ojibwe, have had a remarkable longevity in the Great Lakes region. Ojibwe people who did not participate in ceremonies of a Midewiwin medicine lodge continued to find meaning in indigenous spiritual traditions through their belief in the healing power of song, dance, medicine, and herbs; the value of dreams and prayer; and a deep reverence for sacred places and the spiritual power of the natural world. The most important events to commemorate new life and death—naming ceremonies, feasts, funerals, and rituals of mourning—were all infused with an innate sense of Ojibwe spirituality, despite the permeation of Christianity on reservations.46
The Ojibwe have long used an expression, mino-bimaadizi, to sum up their philosophy of good living, and they define the concept as a desire to experience a long life free of sickness and misfortune. In the Ojibwe worldview, the natural world and cultural formations such as music and dance coexist in a symbiotic partnership that is essential to the good life. Regular prayers and feasts of thanksgiving were commonplace, and offerings always preceded the partaking of fish, game, and other foods. Generosity was a highly developed value on the spiritual road to a good ethical life and was ritualized in ceremony and diplomacy. Spiritual leaders passed down sacred stories in the Midewiwin. Its membership was organized around degrees in the society and required years of study and commitment. Many Ojibwe and Menominee people also incorporated chi-dewe’igan, or Big Drum ceremonies, into their spiritual practice during the reservation era; these originated in the late nineteenth century with the Dakota, who presented an early ceremonial drum to Mille Lacs Ojibwe. Big Drum later declined among the Dakota, though the Ojibwe have continued to practice the ceremony and remember the significant role of Tailfeather Woman, “chosen by the Great Spirit as the recipient of the first Drum.”47
Traditional Ojibwe medicine persisted on the reservation as well. Nawajibigikwe, a woman with extraordinary knowledge of native plants and medicines, was regarded as one of the most skilled healers on the White Earth Reservation in the early twentieth century. She also composed songs related to the herbs and medicines with which she worked.48 White Earth was rich in medicinal herbs and had areas that were ideal for gathering plants. In Ojibwe Country, a dynamic network of women like Nawajibigikwe specialized in plants and their healing properties. At White Earth, Red Lake, and elsewhere on reservations, many of the plants Ojibwe women gathered were used exclusively to address female health issues and wellness. Medicine women harvested plants in August, also the ricing month in the northern Great Lakes region. A plant was picked for its roots, stems, or leaves to make mashkiki (medicine). The Ojibwe approach to wellness linked the body to spiritual and emotional health, a worldview appreciated by very few Westerners who encountered American Indians living on reservations in the early twentieth century.
Government physicians who were aware of Ojibwe medicine women often trivialized their medical expertise while privileging Western ideas and approaches to the body, health, and disease, but women persisted in their work as healers. Ojibwe and non-Indians living on or near the Bay Mills community, in Michigan, in the early twentieth century relied on the skills of Ellen Marshall, who for most of her life worked as a midwife and healer.49 Helen Goggleye, an herbalist, worked in Inger, on the Leech Lake Reservation. She grew up north of Leech Lake in a Canadian community, became the partner of a traditional healer, Joseph Goggleye, and gathered herbs for her husband.50 Dedaatabiik, a Ojibwe woman who lived on the western boundary of the Red Lake Reservation, was an herbalist and medicine woman who doctored the Ojibwe community as well as the nearby Swedish farmers, some of whom married Ojibwe.51 Traditional healers specialized in herbs and medicines, singing healing songs, and other spiritual activities.
These practices, especially the song and dance associated with healing, were frequently challenged when the Ojibwe interacted with government people and their institutions. Field matrons, teachers, and medical professionals hired by the Indian Office to work on reservations condemned the Ojibwe for using natural herbs and medicines and for frequenting native healers. Florence Auginash, who attended elementary school at Red Lake during the 1940s, recalled a time when her father had carefully prepared a poultice of natural medicines for a small infection on her arm. She was distressed and hurt when the school nurse found the poultice, told her it was “dirty,” and washed away all traces of her father’s handiwork.52 Doctors were confounded by the dismal state of health in reservation communities, and blamed families for creating unsanitary living conditions and contributing to high rates of tuberculosis, other disease, and disability. Ojibwe concepts of wellness, medicinal traditions, and cultural views that organized their view of the world with plants and music coexisting in symbiotic partnership came under attack in the reservation period as critics charged that these beliefs held Indians back from assimilation and racial advance, in addition to endangering their health.
In the face of this continuous pressure to curtail indigenous medicine, a significant new healing tradition emerged among Ojibwe women. During the global disaster of Spanish influenza that killed millions of people at the end of World War One, the jingle dress tradition was born.53 Narratives from Ojibwe communities say the tradition sprang from the experience of a young girl who grew very ill and appeared to be near death. The setting is sometimes the Mille Lacs Ojibwe community in Minnesota, other times White Fish Bay, Ontario. Both communities express a great devotion to traditional forms of Ojibwe song and dance. According to the story, the sick girl’s father, fearing the worst, sought a vision to save her life and through this learned of a unique dress and dance. The father made this dress for his daughter and asked her to dance a few springlike steps in which one foot was never to leave the ground. Before long, she felt stronger and continued the dance. After her recovery, she continued to dance in the special dress and eventually formed the first Jingle Dress Dance Society.
Though Ojibwe narratives recount that a man conceived the Jingle Dress Dance after receiving a vision, women were responsible for its proliferation. The first jingle dress dancer was a young girl, yet females of all ages, from youths to elders, historically embraced the tradition. Photographic images from the United States and Canada of Ojibwe women wearing jingle dresses at community pow-wows and dances began to appear shortly after World War One. Special healing songs are associated with the jingle dress, and both songs and dresses possess a strong therapeutic value. Women who participated in the Jingle Dress Dance—dancing to ensure the health and well-being of an individual, their family, or even the broader tribal community—passed the special dresses down to daughters and cherished friends.
Jingle dress dancing holds a spiritual power for Ojibwe people because of its association with healing. In the Ojibwe world, spiritual power moves through air, and sounds hold significance. The jingle dress is special because of the rows of metal cones, zii-baaska iganan in the Ojibwe language, that dangle from the garment and produce a pleasantly dissonant rattle as they bounce against one another, an effect that is amplified when many women dance together. When jingle dresses first appeared, they resembled women’s ceremonial dresses of the era, with rows of jingles added. Dresses from the 1920s often had a sailor collar, popular in the day. Innovation is always a part of pow-wow and dance regalia, and the jingle dress is no exception, but dresses through the decades share many common features.
The Jingle Dress Dance was dream-given to the Ojibwe at a low point in their history, when they were living on reservations and looking for ways to reorder their chaotic world. Beginning in the 1920s and proceeding through each decade thereafter, photographs show Ojibwe women of every generation, from nearly every community in the United States and Canada, wearing jingle dresses. When the dress was introduced, it was an innovation, but one consistent with Ojibwe spiritual practices and traditions of song and dance.54 The dance coincided with a new suppression of Indian religion in the United States as the Dance Order, banning ritualistic dance on reservations, arrived from Washington in 1921.
Nonetheless, the Jingle Dress Dance movement flourished, and the dance has maintained its power for nearly a century in the Great Lakes region. The dress has enduring significance, but it was especially important in shaping how Ojibwe women helped their communities mitigate the perilous effects of American colonialism and cope with reservation life at the historical moment of its origin. In every part of community and economic life related to the well-being of families and health, Ojibwe women were especially active, and the jingle dress and rituals associated with it are part of their legacy.
Wherever they lived or resettled, Ojibwe women engaged the changing world of the reservation straight on. They adapted gender roles and expectations and adjusted labor practices to new circumstances. They worked as healers within their communities and practiced what today we call holistic medicine. Women worked as the principal harvesters of wild rice and maple syrup, and gathered fruits in their communities, bringing good health and stability to Ojibwe life in years otherwise notable for land loss, deprivation, and crisis. Bay Mills, Lac du Flambeau, White Earth, and other reservations were settlements where women’s efforts to hold things together merged tradition and innovation, allowing families and future generations to maintain communities in their homelands.