OJIBWE COMMUNITIES in the United States and Canada are linked historically through kinship, language, culture, politics, and identity. They also share a memory of a time many generations ago when their Anishinaabeg ancestors migrated from the St. Lawrence River to the Straits of Mackinac, a narrow waterway that connects Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, separating Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. Maps of birch bark preserved their migration stories. Michilimackinac (the “Great Turtle”), an island in the straits with a prominent mounded form, was famous for the pike, sturgeon, and whitefish that swam in the cold, blue waters, and it remained for many years the nucleus of the Great Lakes Indian world. Michilimackinac proved to be a momentous place in the Anishinaabeg’s journey to their homelands, for it was here that the Ojibwe parted from their relatives, the Potawatomi and the Ottawa. The Ojibwe settled at Boweting, the outlet of Gichigamiing (Lake Superior) later referred to by French settlers as Sault Ste. Marie. In the early seventeenth century, a portion of the Boweting population moved west to form a significant southern Ojibwe settlement that became known after the fur trade as the village of La Pointe, on Lake Superior’s Madeline Island, in present-day Wisconsin’s Chequamegon Bay. Today a common identity as Anishinaabeg endures for the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwe peoples, even though their division took place in the sixteenth century.1
After their historic journey up the waterways of the Great Lakes around the time of Columbus, Ojibwe clans found economic opportunity and resources that allowed them to spread over a vast region of central North America, constructing communities that by the middle of the eighteenth century were located north of Lake Ontario, around Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, and north of Lake Michigan. The Ojibwe settled on all sides of Lake Superior and as far west as Red Lake, in present-day Minnesota. Ojibwe people who lived near the Minnesota headwaters of one great river named it the Misi-ziibii, or Mississippi. Anishinaabewaki, or Ojibwe territory, spanned both sides of an international border being defined in the aftermath of the American Revolution, a delineation that initially had little consequence for the Ojibwe. They and neighboring nations inhabited a landscape encompassing the Great Lakes as well as the surrounding land and the waters that flow into them; rivers and lakes formed the main roads on the map of Anishinaabewaki.
This book is a history of Ojibwe community life in the Great Lakes since the early nineteenth century, one that unites historical sources featuring the words and experiences of generations of Ojibwe women, especially near Gichigamiing and the Mississippi, where a gendered economy founded on wild rice flourished. The Ojibwe entry into the wild rice district was a milestone marking the end of a journey. With the renewal of community life in the western Great Lakes, Ojibwe women began to hold an important and unique place in their cultures. They inhabited a world in which the earth was gendered female, and they played powerful roles as healers. They organized labor within their community and held property rights over water, making decisions and controlling an essential part of the seasonal economy. Ojibwe women lived in a society that valued an entire system of beliefs associated with women’s work, not just the product of their labor.
When Europeans settled in the Great Lakes, and with the beginning of the fur trade economy in the eighteenth century, Indian women were often positioned as political, social, and economic intermediaries between their people and the newcomers. Women married traders, bridged cultures, and worked to resolve disputes, ensuring sustenance and survival for both their people and the Europeans in an era increasingly complicated by the demands of Western intrusion. Indian women’s lives grew ever more complex during the removal and reservation years, when indigenous political and cultural sovereignty were being undermined by the authority of the U.S. government and Christian organizations. For the Ojibwe, colonial violence against people and the land during the reservation and assimilation era, which began in the nineteenth century, put in jeopardy their traditional economy. This had many repercussions for Ojibwe society, and men and women began to negotiate new labor roles within their communities.
Remarkably, there may be more of a consensus among historians regarding the status of Indian women during the fur trade era than in more recent decades. We are only now beginning to grasp the nature of women’s lives in the twentieth century, especially as more than half of the American Indian population moved to cities in the decades before and after World War Two. My own interviews with Ojibwe women in Minneapolis suggest that women did not forsake the values associated with traditional forms of labor but, rather, found ways to infuse the principles associated with the wild rice economy into urban community living. For the past two centuries in their homeland, Ojibwe women seem to have been working against the weight of history as they sought to control their own destinies. The extension of American colonialism, relocation and reservations, dispossession, and the decline of their traditional economy all presented countless problems for the Ojibwe and their society, yet women’s efforts on behalf of their communities have not significantly diminished.
Getting a clear picture of gender roles in American Indian history has long been a challenge. Early generations of historians lacked the tools and perspective to put them in context. Also, historical sources and documents often misunderstood and misrepresented the Ojibwe and other peoples, portraying women with great contempt or trivializing their work and moral character. Nonetheless, the historical archive—even one produced by biased men who were colonizing North America—can shed light on the history of Ojibwe women in the Great Lakes, especially when colonial documents can be put side by side with Ojibwe accounts of the past. English literacy also became more common among Indian peoples after the arrival of missionaries and the advent of the government boarding school, and Ojibwe writers have left fascinating accounts.
American historians have usually written about the Ojibwe from the perspective of politics. Among the more than one thousand federally recognized tribal nations in the United States and Canada today, the Ojibwe view their political organizations as small nations, with historic political ties to the Ottawa and Potawatomi. After their separation from the Ottawa and the Potawatomi at Michilimackinac, the Ojibwe remained part of an Anishinaabeg political confederacy, the Council of the Three Fires. One widely held view about the name Ojibwe is that it relates to the practice of writing down information and sacred songs in drawings and glyphs on birch bark, from the root ozhibii’. It was the Ojibwe ceremonial responsibility within the council to maintain these birch bark scrolls. Another popular interpretation with linguistic veracity is that Ojibwe refers to a kind of puckered moccasin. Within their own communities, Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi refer to themselves as Anishinaabeg, a highly evocative term that originates in sacred stories and holds a stronger spiritual association. To be Anishinaabe is to be human.
In treaty negotiations and later in describing federal and state relationships, the U.S. government often referred to the Anishinaabeg as Chippewa. That term has endured, though most Ojibwe find it linguistically inaccurate. In addition to the Potawatomi and the Ottawa, the Ojibwe are related to other Algonquian speakers. Anishinaabemowin, their rich and descriptive language, has more than a dozen dialects and is historically (and currently) one of the most prevalent indigenous languages in North America. In the Great Lakes, where indigenous people often spoke more than one language, knowledge of the Ojibwe language was extraordinarily useful, an advantage not missed by the population of early European traders and settlers.2
Ojibwe stories of westward migration from the lower St. Lawrence River were already old when French explorers, missionaries, and traders arrived in the Great Lakes, a time and place described as a middle ground of cultural negotiation.3 Richard White, writing about the early encounters between Indians and Europeans in the region, described French Canada as a historical space where a balance of power existed and was maintained by distinct peoples through mediation and based on each group’s mutual needs. Violence was part of the middle ground. In the second half of the seventeenth century, a period of instability and intermittent warfare began for the Ojibwe and other French-allied Great Lakes Indians as they became caught up in the Iroquois Wars, a military campaign to stop the western Indian fur trade. These took place as far west as northern Lake Michigan and eastern Lake Superior. After 1680, the Ojibwe and their allies successfully countered Iroquois attacks with their own expeditions along the water routes of Lake Ontario, finally forcing the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, to defend their villages. In 1701, the Haudenosaunee negotiated the Great Peace of Montreal with the Ojibwe and other French-allied tribal nations, after which northern Ojibwe spread out from Georgian Bay to settle land between Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario. From 1720 until the British military victory at Montreal in 1760, the French dominated the fur trade with tribal nations in the Great Lakes region.
Throughout these same years, the Ojibwe expanded their territory in the Great Lakes, founding new communities east of Lake Superior but coming into conflict with the Dakota in the contested transition zone, a verdant region connecting the woodlands and prairie where white-tailed deer and wild rice were abundant. Historian Michael Witgen has described the Ojibwe and the Dakota as “two of the largest, most successful and politically diverse Native social formations to dominate the western interior” of North America; he further emphasizes that “both peoples held on to their land base until the second half of the nineteenth century, and both still maintain communities in these homelands.”4 Ojibwe narratives describe a major turning point at mid-century, with the tribe’s success in the battle of Kathio in 1750; in the aftermath, the Dakota retreated to the Minnesota River, abandoning Mille Lacs, Sandy Lake, and other regions in central Minnesota as far north as Canada. Relations between the Ojibwe and the Dakota remained troubled for another century, with periods of sporadic violence and interludes of peace.5 The Dakota writer Charles A. Eastman, in a discussion of Ojibwe-Dakota relations, considered it important to remember that “peaceful meetings were held every summer, at which representatives of the two tribes would recount to another all the events that had come to pass during the preceding year.”6
The Ojibwe did not engage in warfare against the U.S. military, aside from their victories at the Straits of Mackinac in the War of 1812 and in a small conflict on the Leech Lake Reservation in 1898. They maintained relationships of trade and diplomacy and generally accommodated their new neighbors. Nonetheless, local, state, and federal authorities pressured them to negotiate treaties and surrender extensive areas of their homelands, sometimes falsely claiming Ojibwe hostility. In the most difficult times, Ojibwe leaders approached political dialogue with great dignity; as impressive representatives for their people, they negotiated for boundaries and hunting, fishing, and gathering rights over lands ceded in treaties while being tolerant of newcomers in their homelands who respected Ojibwe sovereignty.
Indians’ removal from their homelands is generally associated with policies of the U.S. government in the 1830s, when southeastern tribes were forced to relocate to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma; but British Canada also experimented with Indian removal in the same era, after initiating a “civilization” program that called for Christian conversion. Ottawa and Ojibwe on the islands surrounding the north shore of Lake Huron were expected to consolidate in 1838 at Manitowaning, a settlement on rocky Manitoulin Island. Similar to removal plans in the United States, this was a strategy to open a large part of Upper Canada to Euro-Canadian settlement. Many Ojibwe resisted and eventually abandoned Manitowaning.7 U.S. officials also planned Ojibwe removal from Michigan and Wisconsin at mid-century, imagining an Indian Territory in the north. One little-known genocidal event in the U.S. government’s removal schemes took the lives of an estimated 12 percent of the Wisconsin Ojibwe population: promising annuity payments, authorities pressed the Ojibwe to travel hundreds of miles from home in early winter, to Sandy Lake, in Minnesota Territory, where they were trapped for six weeks of starvation and illness when food and annuities failed to arrive.8
During the years when the Ojibwe expanded their territory in the Great Lakes, the overall North American Indian population experienced a devastating decline, which did not subside until the last decade of the nineteenth century. It is estimated that the Great Lakes Indian population in the mid-eighteenth century numbered sixty thousand people of two dozen or more indigenous nations. By that time, European settlement and the effects of colonialism were already deadly for indigenous Americans, who encountered warfare, geographic removal, land loss, the destruction of their natural resources, environmental degradation, and—most lethal of all—the introduction of new pathogens causing highly transmittable diseases, such as smallpox. It is difficult to locate exactly when the first smallpox epidemic arrived in Anishinaabewaki, but numerous outbreaks are documented. William Whipple Warren, a significant nineteenth-century Ojibwe historian who also had European ancestry, commented on Ojibwe narratives regarding a major smallpox epidemic in the Great Lakes that raged from 1780 to 1782.9 Eastern Michigan Ojibwe ceded Saginaw Valley reservation lands after a smallpox epidemic in 1837 ravaged their population. The Lake Superior Ojibwe reached a population nadir in 1900, a full decade after historical demographers suggest the general U.S. Indian population reached an all-time low. Even as smallpox subsided as a serious threat, diseases related to poor nutrition and diet, especially tuberculosis, became a scourge during the reservation era. The years since 1900 have been a time of modest population recovery for the Ojibwe in the United States and Canada, and their numbers have grown steadily since World War Two.10
Ojibwe leaders from Canada and the United States participated in treaties when confronted with westward settlement, and the treaties were made between governments. The first Canadian treaty was negotiated in southern Manitoba in 1871, a time when the United States began to refer to the treaty process with Indian nations as “agreements,” while both treaties and agreements continued in full force under the law. The 1871 negotiation, known as Treaty 1, verbally confirmed to the Ojibwe their right to hunt and fish over the land being transferred. In 1873, indigenous leaders insisted on including provisions for hunting and fishing in Treaty 3, which involved shared responsibility over fifty-five thousand square miles, primarily in Ontario. Ojibwe leaders in the United States were also concerned about their continued right to hunt, fish, and gather over lands ceded to the federal government in nineteenth-century treaties, understanding that their livelihoods would be severely curtailed without those conditions. The Treaty of 1837 with the United States included terms that guaranteed this privilege, though Lake Superior Ojibwe leaders sold nearly nine thousand square miles of land in the agreement; it was not a removal treaty.11 Ojibwe leaders negotiated treaties on behalf of their people in order to maintain the rights to use their land and to harvest and take responsibility for its resources while conceding that they would share their country with newcomers, many of whom were primarily interested in pine lands for lumbering.
Later Ojibwe migrations in the Great Lakes, a number of them involuntary, came in the aftermath of piecemeal negotiations in the United States and Canada, which resulted in Ojibwe holding on to a fraction of their extensive former territories in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ontario, and Manitoba. Reservations were established for the Lake Superior Ojibwe in 1854 in a historic negotiation with the United States, the Treaty of La Pointe. This treaty created four Wisconsin reservations, at Red Cliff, Bad River, Lac du Flambeau, and Lac Courte Oreilles; St. Croix and Mole Lake Ojibwe were left out of the treaty, without firm title to land until the twentieth century. Grand Portage, Fond du Lac, and Bois Forte Ojibwe were also designated as Lake Superior Chippewa and established Minnesota reservations. The Treaty of La Pointe and the Detroit Treaty of 1855 also created reservations in Michigan. The 1855 Treaty of Washington led to the establishment of northern Minnesota reservations, and an 1867 treaty created a large reservation, White Earth, intended as a new homeland for all the Minnesota Ojibwe, a plan only partially realized. Red Lake established reservation boundaries through an agreement negotiated in 1889. Ojibwe also founded new communities on the plains—one in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota and another when the Little Shell Band moved into Montana—while others joined the Cree at Rocky Boy’s in Montana.
A new chapter in the history of the Great Lakes emerged once territories, states, and provinces were founded in Anishinaabewaki. The early years were sometimes characterized by a rich encounter involving coexistence, intermarriage, commerce, and cultural exchange, in addition to conflict and violence. The always unsteady equilibrium ended once local and state governments established regional jurisdictions that attempted to intervene and challenge the rights reserved in treaties between indigenous nations and the federal government. Ojibwe living within the borders of new states, including Wisconsin and Minnesota, were steadily and systematically harassed for more than a century by citizens and local law authorities when they exercised treaty rights by hunting, fishing, and gathering in their homelands.
When the United States passed the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887, calling for individual property ownership on reservations, a collection of circumstances opened the floodgates to land loss for Ojibwe and other American Indians. In the late nineteenth century, reformers and policymakers promoted allotment, which would break up traditional forms of land tenure, as the all-round solution to the “Indian problem.” As in the prior removal and reservation-consolidation efforts of the U.S. government, land was identified as key to moving forward with a progressive Indian policy. Politicians and their allies reasoned that Indians must be “civilized” for their own advantage, become “Americanized” enough to be citizens of the United States, and turn into private property owners. There was a corresponding residential school system established in Canada and the United States, to instill values of individualism and assimilation in indigenous children. For many decades, thousands of young Indians were taken from their families to distant boarding schools designed to separate them from their identity and communities. Reservations, including White Earth, were plundered for land and resources by timber companies and their allies in business and politics during this era. Not until the 1930s did the United States abandon the policies of assimilation and allotment or begin to promote integration in public schools for American Indian children.
The dispossession of the allotment era led to an early-twentieth-century migration of American Indians to cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. The Twin Cities metropolitan area eventually became home to a population of thirty thousand from more than forty tribal nations. Ojibwe and other First Nations people have made Winnipeg and Toronto centers of their urban life, and other Canadian cities have sizable indigenous populations. World War Two gave further momentum to a migration already ignited by land loss and economic necessity. In another form of twentieth-century mobility, Ojibwe soldiers traveled to every theater of global conflict during the war. Indeed, native participation was higher than that of any other ethnic group or segment of the general population in the United States and Canada.
Minneapolis became the center of a national Indian activism in the late 1960s, when the American Indian Movement formed to combat police brutality and discrimination. The movement rapidly spread to other cities in the United States and Canada. There are today more than a thousand federally recognized First Nations governments and sovereign Indian tribes in Canada and the United States, and among those are a total Ojibwe population of more than 200,000, with 105,907 self-identified as Ojibwe in the United States and 94,350 in Canada.12 The urban community has played a dynamic role in Indian life, yet most tribal people have remained fully engaged with family, culture, politics, and issues on reservations outside the city. In fact, the growth of Indian-owned businesses since the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, with its employment opportunities on the reservations, led to a new migration of urban Indians back home. Bryan v. Itasca County, a court case initiated by tribal member Russell Bryan on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, led to the milestone U.S. Supreme Court decision in the 1970s that provided the legal foundation for Indian gaming. Bryan, who lived in a modest mobile home on Leech Lake, refused to pay the $147.95 tax on the trailer that Itasca County had levied, successfully challenging the long-standing practice of state regulation of tribes and tribal members on reservation land without the approval of Congress.13 Ojibwe people, who still hold considerable real estate in the United States and maintain dozens of communities in Canada, are political partners in the protection of sovereignty in their nations, which are primarily located in the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba and the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana.
My own Ojibwe community is the Red Lake Reservation, in northern Minnesota, the place where I was born and hold tribal membership. In area, Red Lake is the largest Ojibwe place in the United States or Canada completely owned by its original people. Our landscape encompasses more than eight hundred thousand acres of forest, land, and water, including one of the largest freshwater lakes in the United States and dozens of smaller lakes and wetlands. I come from an extraordinarily strong community with a powerful sense of place and a commitment to interpreting and remembering history. History is deeply rooted in our family stories and community life. We are the descendants of earlier generations who were deeply affected by treaties and land and assimilation policies, and because of that we have a profound awareness of our survival as a people. My earlier book, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940, was motivated and influenced by the experiences of my grandmother Jeanette Jones Auginash, who, as a young woman in the early 1920s, left Red Lake for a few years to attend a government boarding school in South Dakota.14 My grandmother and her family spoke the Ojibwe language. When she returned home after her time at school to marry and raise five children, she and my grandfather also spoke Ojibwe with their children, who learned English as well once they began attending school on the reservation. The youngest of their children was my mother, Florence Auginash Child. My mother, aunts, and uncles taught us about their experiences growing up on the reservation before and after World War Two. My uncles were veterans of the Korean War and had great, raucous stories of their time away from Red Lake when they were young men. They liked to hunt, trap, and fish—and tell stories about hunting and trapping and fishing at Red Lake.
I now realize that my grandmother, mother, and aunts had different memories of Red Lake. They frequently talked about the seasonal cycle they enjoyed as Ojibwe people, the wild-rice camp they set up in August, running from bears while picking blueberries, working the sugar bush, and making holes in the ice in winter to retrieve fresh water. One of the defining stories of my mother’s childhood involved her family’s annual pilgrimage to visit Bizhik, a medicine woman of some prominence who lived in Ponemah, a small Ojibwe town that rises from the water on a peninsula where our vast freshwater lake divides into lower and upper portions. As they do today, our family lived in Redby, some twenty miles south around the other side of the lake. I grew up understanding that women figured prominently in Ojibwe families and communities and witnessing the tragedy of social problems and poverty. The elders were always a source of strength. We respected women who assumed demanding economic and cultural roles, and we deferred to a power and authority that seemed to grow even more concentrated with age and maturity. My work as a historian has always been inspired by the Auginash family and the people of Red Lake, as well as by my experiences working in archives and teaching history and American Indian studies in the university.
Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community makes a case for the significant involvement of women as society builders, which allowed their communities to persevere in an era dominated by the expansion of American colonialism. At each stage, women marshaled much of the economy, and their roles and traditions were critical in sustaining Ojibwe communities in the face of forces that often aimed not only to cause physical destruction but to stamp out their entire way of life. Women like Nodinens, an Ojibwe from central Minnesota born in the nineteenth century who worked with the enthnologist Frances Densmore, illustrate patterns of life that encompassed skill and environmental virtuosity in working the highly coordinated efficiency of the Ojibwe seasonal round, a lifestyle slated for obliteration and considered primitive in her own time.15 Nodinens is one of dozens of women who have eloquently narrated a significant aspect of the Great Lakes region’s history and, in the process, provided useful information that explains how Ojibwe people developed patterns of life that would one day help them survive the unpredictability and unemployment that came with reservations.
Spoken and written records have allowed me to research women in the twentieth century as allotment, changing family structures, education in boarding schools, relocation, and the influence of Christianity caused once resilient parts of Ojibwe life to weaken, posing a challenge to women’s long-standing roles. Wars and military service, new policies after the wars, and economically depressed reservations compelled Indians to relocate to urban centers, where women committed to new agendas in the community. Women worked long and hard, but they could not counter all the effects of colonialism and federal policies that undermined Ojibwe sovereignty and community life. Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor, born in Minneapolis, frequently invokes the word survivance to describe the unique history of survival and resistance that sustained indigenous creativity within their communities, despite conditions of domination and colonialism. Like Wazhashk, the resilient muskrat whose fortitude defines the outcome of more than one indigenous creation story, the Ojibwe people have survived. In every journey and story of survivance, women were at the heart of the Ojibwe sense of their world.
After five centuries in the western Great Lakes, Ojibwe people keep alive a memory of that long historic journey that brought them to their homelands. For them, the community is a place but also a spiritual space that binds them together in a sacred landscape. The survival of that community has never been guaranteed, and as we will see, it came with a heavy price. Even today, our language and, with it, many aspects of our indigenous knowledge and culture continue to be endangered. It is therefore reassuring that many of our people still live close to the land and to history, allowing Ojibwe historical knowledge to remain dynamic and survive in stories and places. We gain insight into the past by living in and caring deeply about the same landscape that our ancestors did, singing songs they composed, or working as they did by fishing or harvesting wild rice. My goal has been to remember the work and vision of generations of Ojibwe women who shaped life in their communities, a force greater than treaties that binds us to our homelands.