Ojibwe
The Ojibwe (“oh-jib-way”) are an indigenous people of North America. Ojibwe country is often associated with the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwest, particularly with the shores of Lake Superior; it extends over 1,400 miles from Ontario to Saskatchewan on the Canadian side of the border and from Michigan to eastern Montana on the U.S. side of the border. Known for its cold winters and hot, dry summers, this area includes the northern portions of five states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Montana) and southern portions of three Canadian provinces (Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan). The Ojibwe call themselves the Anishinabeg (also spelled Anishinaabeg or, if singular, Anishinabe) for “first” or “original people.”
According to Barry M. Pritzer's A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples (2000), there were at least 35,000 Ojibwe people at the time of first contact with Europeans, in this case the French. Precontact culture was heavily influenced by the natural terrain as the Ojibwe adapted their lifestyle to survive in a heavily forested land traversed by a network of lakes and rivers. The Ojibwe lived a seminomadic life, moving a number of times each year in order to be close to food sources. While distinct from the Potawatomi and Ottawa peoples, the Ojibwe migrated west with these groups and were referred to as the People of the Three Fires.
Today Ojibwe people live in cities, towns near reservations, and on reservation lands. Federally recognized Ojibwe reservations are located in Minnesota (Fond du Lac, Grand Portage, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, Nett Lake [Bois Forte Band], Red Lake, and White Earth), Michigan (Bay Mills Indian Community, Grande Traverse, Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, Saginaw, and Sault Sainte Marie), Wisconsin (Bad River, Lac Courte Oreilles, Lac du Flambeau, Lac Vieux Desert, Mole Lake or Sokaogan Chippewa Community, Red Cliff, and St. Croix), Montana (Rocky Boy), and North Dakota (Turtle Mountain). There are also Ojibwe reserves in Canada, especially in Ontario and Saskatchewan. The Ojibwe are known for their political involvement in the Red Power movement of the 1970s and for their many writers. In the early twenty-first century they have made important contributions to the study and recovery of their indigenous language, Anishinabemowin.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimates for 2009–2011, there were 187,410 people of Chippewa ancestry living in the United States. In addition to the states where Ojibwe reservations are located, other states where significant numbers of Ojibwe reside are California, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington. More recently, some Ojibwe have recognized reservation lands as homelands, and some members are working to preserve the reservations' natural resources while also recovering their traditional culture.
Entry from Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America
Books & eBooks
Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River by ISBN: 9781496202253Publication Date: 2018-01-01In Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River Jennifer S. H. Brown presents the dozens of stories and memories that A. Irving Hallowell recorded from Adam (Samuel) Bigmouth, son of Ochiipwamoshiish (Northern Barred Owl), at Little Grand Rapids in the summers of 1938 and 1940. The stories range widely across the lives of four generations of Anishinaabeg along the Berens River in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. In an open and wide-ranging conversation, Hallowell discovered that Bigmouth was a vivid storyteller as he talked about the eight decades of his own life and the lives of his father, various relatives, and other persons of the past. Bigmouth related stories about his youth, his intermittent work for the Hudson's Bay Company, the traditional curing of patients, ancestral memories, encounters with sorcerers, and contests with cannibalistic windigos. The stories also tell of vision-fasting experiences, often fraught gender relations, and hunting and love magic--all in a region not frequented by Indian agents and little visited by missionaries and schoolteachers. With an introduction and rich annotations by Brown, a renowned authority on the Upper Berens Anishinaabeg and Hallowell's ethnography, Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River is an outstanding primary source for both First Nations history and the oral literature of Canada's Ojibwe peoples.
Seasons of Change by ISBN: 1469617293Publication Date: 2014-08-15From the 1870s to the 1930s, the Lake Superior Ojibwes of Minnesota and Wisconsin faced dramatic economic, political, and social changes. Examining a period that began with the tribe's removal to reservations and closed with the Indian New Deal, Chantal Norrgard explores the critical link between Ojibwes' efforts to maintain their tribal sovereignty and their labor traditions and practices. As Norrgard explains, the tribe's "seasonal round" of subsistence-based labor was integral to its survival and identity. Though encroaching white settlement challenged these labor practices, Ojibwe people negotiated treaties that protected their rights to make a living by hunting, fishing, and berrying and through work in the fur trade, the lumber industry, and tourism. Norrgard shows how the tribe strategically used treaty rights claims over time to uphold its right to work and to maintain the rhythm and texture of traditional Ojibwe life. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including New Deal-era interviews with Ojibwe people, Norrgard demonstrates that while American expansion curtailed the Ojibwes' land base and sovereignty, the tribe nevertheless used treaty-protected labor to sustain its lifeways and meet economic and political needs--a process of self-determination that continues today.
To Be the Main Leaders of Our People by ISBN: 0870139320Publication Date: 2012-01-01In the spring of 1868, people from several Ojibwe villages located along the upper Mississippi River were relocated to a new reservation at White Earth, more than 100 miles to the west. In many public declarations that accompanied their forced migration, these people appeared to embrace the move, as well as their conversion to Christianity and the new agrarian lifestyle imposed on them. Beneath this surface piety and apparent acceptance of change, however, lay deep and bitter political divisions that were to define fundamental struggles that shaped Ojibwe society for several generations. In order to reveal the nature and extent of this struggle for legitimacy and authority, To Be The Main Leaders of Our People reconstructs the political and social history of these Minnesota Ojibwe communities between the years 1825 and 1898. Ojibwe political concerns, the thoughts and actions of Ojibwe political leaders, and the operation of the Ojibwe political system define the work's focus. Kugel examines this particular period of time because of its significance to contemporary Ojibwe history. The year 1825, for instance, marked the beginning of a formal alliance with the United States; 1898 represented not an end, but a striking point of continuity, defying the easy categorizations of Native peoples made by non-Indians, especially in the closing years of the nineteenth century. In this volume, the Ojibwe "speak for themselves," as their words were recorded by government officials, Christian missionaries, fur traders, soldiers, lumbermen, homesteaders, and journalists. While they were nearly always recorded in English translation, Ojibwe thoughts, perceptions, concerns, and even humor, clearly emerge. To Be The Main Leaders of Our People expands the parameters of how oral traditions can be used in historical writing and sheds new light on a complex, but critical, series of events in ongoing relations between Native and non-Native people.
Chi-Mewinzha by ISBN: 0816697264Publication Date: 2015-05-24In the first ninety-five years of her life, Dorothy Dora Whipple has seen a lot of history, and in this book that history, along with the endangered Ojibwe language, sees new life. A bilingual record of Dorothy's stories, ranging from personal history to cultural teachings, Chi-mewinzha (long ago) presents this venerable elder's words in the original Ojibwe, painstakingly transcribed, and in English translation to create an invaluable resource for learning this cherished language. The events of Dorothy Dora Whipple's life resonate with Ojibwe life and culture through the twentieth century, from tales of growing up among the Anishinaabeg of the Leech Lake Reservation in the 1920s and 1930s to an account of watching an American Indian Movement protest in Minneapolis during the 1970s. In between, we encounter modern dilemmas (like trying to find a place to make a tobacco offering in an airport) and traditional stories (such as the gigantic beings who were seen in the water chi-mewinzha). Dorothy's own recollections--sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant--offer insight into the daily realities, both intimate and emblematic, of Native American life. Dorothy remembers an older sister coming home from boarding school, no longer speaking Ojibwe--and no longer able to communicate with her siblings. This collection resists such a fate, sharing the language so critical to a people's identity and offering a key text to those who would learn, preserve, and speak Ojibwe.
