Living Our Language_ Ojibwe Tales & Oral Histories - Anton Treuer [2]
Over the past several years, I recorded numerous Ojibwe elders from my home community of Leech Lake and the neighboring reservations of White Earth, Red Lake, and Mille Lacs. I also came under the cultural tutelage of Archie Mosay, an elder from the St. Croix Reservation of Wisconsin, and recorded some of his stories as well. I never recorded any sacred legends, which are strictly taught through oral instruction only. However, the narrations of childhood memories and Ojibwe lifeways tell a great deal about how Ojibwe people lived, thought, and persevered during the tumultuous twentieth century.
This anthology is rich and varied. Not only do the assorted speakers have different ways of speaking Ojibwe, they also have very different experiences and philosophies about anishinaabe-izhichigewin—the Indian culture—and anishinaabemowin—the Ojibwe language. The stories are vividly detailed, and often the speakers paint a verbal canvas of Ojibwe living: maple sugar camps, ricing, spearing fish, and religious ceremonies. A picture of early-twentieth-century life comes alive in the tellings of these gifted orators—whether it is Susan Jackson’s explanations of rabbit snaring at Inger on the Leech Lake Reservation or Archie Mosay’s description of the tall pine forests of the 1910s, where lack of undergrowth left a silent carpet upon which he could approach white-tailed deer. The history revealed in these stories is of great importance as well, and historical narrations about everything from Ojibwe-Dakota warfare to boarding schools and military experience during the Second World War abound. Indeed, when Porky White remembers his namesake, a Civil War veteran, it becomes strikingly clear just how much has changed in a very short time for the Ojibwe.
The serious narratives about culture and history are great fun to read, as they are interwoven with a thread of humor. Examples of comic recollections include the image of Archie Mosay, a full-grown man and father, fearfully running off the footpath and hiding in the brush the first time he saw an automobile, as well as his stories about the first time he saw a black man and the devilish tricks he played on people while hunting. Other speakers describe their misbehavior as children with enthusiasm and detail, whether is it Emma Fisher siccing her dogs on her uncle or Porky White explaining that he was nicknamed “Porky” because he followed around an elder man who looked like a porcupine. And, at times, the stories presented have the sole purpose of entertainment, whether it is Scott Headbird telling about two Red Lake Indians who got a mouse inebriated or Joe Auginaush describing Wenabozho playing baseball at Rice Lake. The narrations contain a breadth of character and detail that covers every experience, from the fun and folly of youth to the wisdom and deep-thinking philosophy of old age.
The Ojibwe of Minnesota
From their original homelands on the Atlantic Coast of the United States, the Ojibwe and other Algonquian tribes had been migrating westward for centuries before European contact. The spiritual and economic rationales for this radical change in demographics are still well documented in the oral tradition of the Ojibwe people.4 By the time French explorers first penetrated the central Great Lakes in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Ojibwe had already established numerous villages west of Sault Ste. Marie.
The fur trade was to change Ojibwe life forever. As Dutch and then British empires sparred with the French for control of the beaver trade and first rights to colonization, their actions sparked both declines in the populations of fur-bearing animals due to over-trapping and