The Anishinaabe

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In the moon when the wild rice ripens, the shallow lakes of the upper Great Lakes go green and gold with manoomin, the grain that grows on the water. Two people work a canoe through it: one poles the boat slowly along the standing stalks, the other bends the heads over the gunwale with a pair of light cedar sticks and knocks the ripe seed loose into the hull. Most of it falls into the boat; a good share of it falls back into the lake, which is how it is meant to be, so that there will be rice again next year. The harvesters are Anishinaabe, and the lake is the country their ancestors were told to find — the place, in the old prophecy, where the food grows upon the water.

The original people

Anishinaabe is what they call themselves; in the plural, Anishinaabeg. The word is generally rendered as “the original people” or “the first people,” and it names a wide kinship of nations rather than a single tribe. The largest of them are the Ojibwe — also written Ojibway or Ojibwa, and known in much of the United States by the treaty spelling Chippewa — together with the Odawa (Ottawa) and the Potawatomi. These three are the Council of Three Fires, an old confederacy whose members keep their distinct roles: in the tradition the Ojibwe are the elder brothers and keepers of the faith, the Odawa the traders, the Potawatomi the keepers of the fire. Their language, Anishinaabemowin, belongs to the Algonquian family that once stretched from the Atlantic seaboard deep into the interior, and it remains one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages north of Mexico.

Their own account of how they came to the Great Lakes is a migration story, kept in the oral tradition and recorded on birchbark. In the telling, the people once lived far to the east, by the great salt water, and were warned by a succession of prophets — the seven fires of the prophecy — that they must move west or be destroyed. They were to follow the sacred miigis, a luminous cowrie shell that rose from the water to show the way, traveling from one stopping-place to the next over generations until they reached the country where food grew on the water. That sign was manoomin, the wild rice of the lakes and marshes of present-day Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ontario. At the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron meets Lake Michigan, the people divided into the three fires, and from there spread across the lake country and beyond — westward toward the prairie edge, north and east across what is now Ontario and Quebec. This is sacred history, not a dig report, and the Anishinaabe tell it as their own; archaeology can speak to an Algonquian presence in the western Great Lakes but cannot supply the shell or the prophets.

Today the Anishinaabe are among the most numerous Indigenous peoples on the continent — on the order of a hundred and seventy thousand in the United States and a comparable number in Canada, where the Ojibwe are second in population only to the Cree. They are not a people of the past tense. They live in scores of federally recognized tribal nations and First Nations strung across the lakes and the northern woods — from Michigan and Wisconsin through Minnesota to North Dakota and Montana, and across the border from Quebec to the prairie provinces — each band with its own government, its own seat at the table of two settler states, and its own hold on a homeland the Anishinaabe call Turtle Island, the great land that rests on the back of a turtle.

A birchbark canoe of the Ojibwe in Minnesota, photographed about 1910. Unknown authorUnknown author, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A world full of manitou

The Anishinaabe world is densely inhabited. It is full of manitou — the spirit-powers, the other-than-human persons whose presence is the inherent sacredness of a thing. A manitou may belong to an animal kind or a plant, to thunder or to the water under the ice, to a place or a stone; the world is not a stage with a few gods upon it but a community of persons, most of them not human. Over and through them stands Gitche Manitou, the Great Spirit — Gichi-manidoo in the modern spelling — the creating power and giver of life. Within the woodland frame Gitche Manitou is not a sky-king who meddles in human affairs but something vaster and quieter: a benevolent, all-pervading life force, rarely personified and seldom addressed as a character in the stories, closer to a Great Mystery than to a man on a throne.

That last point matters, because the most common outside mistake about the Anishinaabe and their Algonquian kin has been to collapse the diffuse, graded reality of manitou — a quality that things and beings possess in degrees — into a single capital-G “Great Spirit” on the Christian model. The word manitou names a power, not only a person; the same root that gives Gitche Manitou its name runs through a whole vocabulary of spirit and holiness. The high creator is real within this world, but to read him as a lonely monotheist’s God is to flatten a cosmos of many powers into one, and to miss what the Anishinaabe were actually describing.

Among the powers of that cosmos is the great bird of the upper air, the Thunderbird, whose wingbeats are the thunder and whose glance is the lightning, and whose ancient antagonist is the horned, scaled being of the deep water and the lakes. The Anishinaabe share the thunderbird with many nations of the woodlands and plains, though to share a power is not to hold an identical one; the bird of the upper world means something specific here, in a country of inland seas where the line between the sky and the water under the ice is the line along which the world is charged. The stories that carry these beings come in two kinds the Anishinaabe distinguish: the aadizookaanag, the sacred myths of the powers, which in the old discipline were told only in winter when the ground was frozen; and the dibaajimowinan, the ordinary narratives of history and memory, which may be told at any time.

The Grand Medicine Society and the scrolls

The central religious institution of the Anishinaabe is the Midewiwin — the Mide society, usually translated as the “Grand Medicine Society,” though fluent speakers warn that the English is a loose net over a word that reaches toward “the way of the heart” and “the sacred mystery” at once. The historian Michael Angel has described it as “a flexible, tenacious tradition that provided an institutional setting for the teaching of the world view (religious beliefs) of the Ojibwa people” — that is, less a church than a school of the sacred, a graded society into which a person is initiated and through which, over a lifetime of study, ceremony, and instruction, one advances by degrees. Its members, the Midew, are healers and keepers of knowledge; its concern is long life lived rightly, mino-bimaadiziwin, the good and healthy life. Much of what the society holds is restricted to the initiated, and properly so; it is described here at the distance the tradition itself keeps, by its public meaning and not by any operative detail of its rites.

What makes the Midewiwin remarkable in the wider story of the pre-contact Great Lakes is what it did to remember. Its teachings, songs, and the path of initiation were inscribed on rolls of birchbark — wiigwaasabakoon — in a system of incised pictographs: figures of the powers, of the lodge, of the migration, of the steps of the Mide path, set down as a mnemonic notation that a trained reader could unfold into songs and instruction. This is not an alphabet, and it would mislead to call the Anishinaabe a literate people in the European sense; the pictographs prompt a knower who already holds the songs rather than spelling out speech to a stranger. But it is the nearest thing to a writing system that the woodlands produced before contact, a durable graphic memory for a sacred curriculum, and it is old. One large scroll was remembered to have served the Midewiwin at Mille Lacs across five generations, and birchbark of this kind has been dated to well before any European reached the lakes.

Much of what the outside world knows of these scrolls, too, reached it through an intermediary. In the late 1880s the ethnologist W. J. Hoffman collected birchbark song-scrolls and their chants among the Ojibwe at White Earth, Minnesota, and published them in 1891 in the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology as “The Midē′wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa.” His plates fixed in print what had been a living, guarded notation, and they are a record worth having — but they are also a record made by a government scientist, of a sacred curriculum, in a generation that was simultaneously trying to suppress it. The same source-problem that runs through everything outsiders wrote of the Anishinaabe runs through the documentation of the scrolls: the knowledge was Anishinaabe and its keepers were Anishinaabe, but the hand that copied it down was not.

Beneath the religious order runs the order of kinship: the doodem, or dodem — the clan, the source of the English word “totem.” A person inherits a doodem, usually through the father, and it is named for a being: Crane, Loon, Bear, Marten, Catfish, and the rest, each clan with its character and its customary work, the Crane and the Loon associated with leadership, the Bear with protection and medicine. The doodem orders marriage, hospitality, and standing; two strangers who share a clan are kin, and may not marry. Over this social frame the year itself turns in a fixed round. Late winter is the sugaring, when the people move to the maple stands and boil the rising sap into sugar. Spring and summer bring fishing and gardens and the gathering of the lakes. Autumn is the ricing, the harvest on the water that the prophecy promised. Winter is the hunt, and the time of the sacred stories. The seasons, the clans, the manitou, and the Mide lodge are not separate departments of life; they are one fabric, and the birchbark scrolls were the place where its pattern was written down.

Outsiders’ Anishinaabe, and the living nation

Most of what the wider world first learned of the Anishinaabe it learned from a single intermediary, and read through him. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie and later in Michigan, married into a prominent Ojibwe-Irish family — his wife, Bamewawagezhikaquay, Jane Johnston, was herself a writer — and through that connection gathered the Ojibwe stories he published, most influentially in Algic Researches of 1839. Schoolcraft’s collections preserved a great deal that might otherwise have been lost. They also passed it through a heavy filter: he was an outsider to the sacred frame, a man of his century’s tastes, and he reshaped and expurgated what he set down, smoothing the trickster-transformer figure the Ojibwe called Nanabozho into something more decorous than the bawdy, anarchic culture-hero of the actual stories.

From Schoolcraft the material passed to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who in 1855 turned it into The Song of Hiawatha, the most widely read American poem of its age and the source of nearly everything the nineteenth-century public thought it knew about the Anishinaabe. The poem is also a case study in how reception distorts. Longfellow built his hero out of Schoolcraft’s Nanabozho but gave him the name Hiawatha — a name that does not belong to the Ojibwe trickster at all, but to a historical co-founder of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, a different people, a different language, a different story. Schoolcraft had conflated the two, and Longfellow, working from him, fused an Ojibwe figure to an Iroquois name and dressed the whole in a borrowed Finnish meter. The result entered American memory as the very image of “the Indian,” and it is almost entirely an outsider’s invention. The Anishinaabe were spoken for, in their absence, by men who did not understand what they were repeating.

The same century brought harder things than bad poetry. The Anishinaabe ceded enormous tracts of land to the United States and to Britain and Canada in treaty after treaty across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often under pressure and unequal terms, in exchange for reserved homelands and reserved rights. The United States then pursued allotment, which broke up communal land; both settler states ran the boarding and residential schools that took Anishinaabe children from their families to be stripped of language and religion; and the practice of Native religion was suppressed for generations, effectively unprotected in American law until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. The Midewiwin went quiet in many places, driven underground or thinned out — but it did not die. It was carried in private, taught where it was safe to teach, and has revived openly in living memory.

The treaties, too, proved more durable than the men who imposed them imagined. When the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and others ceded land in Minnesota in 1837, they reserved the right to hunt, fish, and gather in the ceded territory — a usufructuary right that the state spent the better part of a century treating as extinct. In 1999, in Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, the United States Supreme Court held, by a single vote, that the 1837 rights had never been extinguished and remained in force. The decision affirmed that an Anishinaabe family today may take fish and rice in the old way, on the old ground, by a promise made before Minnesota was a state. Across the lake country the bands now manage that harvest cooperatively, and manoomin — the food that grows on the water — has become a rallying point in its own right, defended against pollution and shifting water levels as both a food and a relative.

The work of the present is, above all, the work of return. Anishinaabemowin is being taught again in immersion schools where children learn every subject in the language, in university programs, in households where elders and grandchildren rebuild what the boarding schools tried to break. The Mide lodges hold their ceremonies. The scrolls are read by those entrusted with them. To find the Anishinaabe, one need not reconstruct a vanished people from Schoolcraft’s pages or Longfellow’s verse; one need only go up to the rice lakes in the autumn, where the canoes are out among the standing manoomin, and the harvest the prophecy promised is still being gathered, as it was meant to be, with a share left falling back to the water for the years to come.

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