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[61] So maybe that’s the extent of what I’m going to tell you. Maybe again another time I will tell you legends, another time when I’m up to it. Sometimes I know that legend, I’ll remember the first part, the first part well. Not the different parents, but you can pick up different parts. And later on, that legend comes in two parts. It is called Makoozid. It is in two parts. In the first that Makoozid stole the earth. And he married the great chief’s daughter. And there the story changes again. Again it is different in the second part when they lived well. I know it. But I don’t know the second part. But it was only the first that I used to know so well. I always listened to them. Makoozid as he was called, when the great chief urinated there, that’s how he came to have the foot of a bear. Some time I’ll tell you the legend. I don’t tell you legends too much. It might be an hour long there or more. I’m not sure.

[62] That’s it.

[63] Ho, thank you.

[64] Okay.

* The following passage refers to Bagone-giizhig, or Hole in the Day II of Gull Lake, Minnesota, who made overtures about drawing the Ojibwe into the U.S.–Dakota Conflict of 1862. The Mille Lacs leadership strongly opposed his efforts.

† Here he refers to the Civil War.

Gaa-waababiganikaag

White Earth

JOE AUGINAUSH

JOE AUGINAUSH (1922–2000), whose Anishinaabe name was Giniwaanakwad, was a man of remarkable wisdom. He both watched and participated in incredible changes for Ojibwe people during his years on earth. Those experiences, his intelligence, and time combined to develop his inspiring world view.

Joe Maude, as friends often called him, was one of the last Anishinaabe from the White Earth Reservation to have been born in a wiigiwaam or nisawa’ogaan. His family followed the seasonal rounds of traditional Ojibwe life at the large and vibrant Ojibwe village called Gaa-jiikajiwegamaag on the south shore of Roy Lake, where Joe spent the first several years of his life, in the wiigiwaam his parents maintained for their entire family. They built a nisawa’ogaan near Gaaniizhogamaag (Naytahwaush, Minnesota) for maple sugaring in the spring and a new wiigiwaam for ricing at Manoominiganzhikaaning (Rice Lake, Minnesota) in the fall, but Gaa-jiikajiwegamaag was home.

The seasonal lifestyle was a happy one for Joe, who remembered with special fondness the now-deserted village at Gaa-jiikajiwegamaag and the large rice camps at Manoominiganzhikaaning, where people from all over White Earth and even the neighboring reservations came for the harvest. It is widely believed that Manoominiganzhikaaning offered one of the largest and finest wild rice beds in the state of Minnesota. Soil erosion, flooding, and chemical run-off from nearby chicken farms and cattle ranches have recently damaged the rice beds there, but during Joe’s childhood the site was truly remarkable, with hundreds of Ojibwe camped out, harvesting and processing wild rice all day and singing and playing moccasin games all night. Joe Maude once remarked to me that he couldn’t understand how so many people got by with so little sleep, as the camp was buzzing day and night.

Joe Maude’s father eventually built a log house on Auginaush Creek, not far from the main village at Gaa-jiikajiiwegamaag, where the family lived for several more years. However, as the tribal housing project at Rice Lake expanded, the village was abandoned, and most families moved to Rice Lake or Naytahwaush for the luxury of modern homes and easier access to developed roads and the towns of Bagley, Detroit Lakes, and Bemidji.

Adolescence was difficult for Joe Maude, as he was taken away from his family and sent to a Bureau of Indian Affairs residential boarding school at Wahpeton, North Dakota. The school was strictly regimented, and Joe remembered with great anger that he was beaten for speaking the only language he knew—Ojibwe. He recalled that he and other children would gather to secretly converse in Ojibwe and sing pow-wow songs. He got his share of beatings, but