Living Our Language_ Ojibwe Tales & Oral Histories - Anton Treuer [8]
Born in a wiigiwaam on August 20, 1901, near Balsam Lake, Wisconsin, Archie was raised in a traditional Indian community.3 He was known only by his Indian name. The name “Archie” was given to him as a teenager when he went to work as a farm hand. The white wife of his employer was shocked to learn that he had no English name. When he returned to the farmhouse for lunch one day, she told him, “I have a name for you—‘Archie.’” Niibaa-giizhig liked his new name and carried it with pride throughout the rest of his years.
Life was filled with hardships for Archie’s family during his youth. In 1918 a flu epidemic ravaged the Ojibwe communities along the St. Croix River, taking Archie’s maternal grandmother and his two siblings in one night. Archie’s first wife and first child died of tuberculosis. In spite of these sorrows, Archie rebounded, remarried, and fathered eight more children.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Archie was instructed not only in ancient Ojibwe lifeways, but also in the complicated rituals of ceremonial leadership. At the age of twelve, he became Oshkaabewis (Messenger) in the Midewiwin (Medicine Lodge). In this position, he began to learn the complicated procedures and detailed legends essential to the ceremonies he would conduct later in his life. A skilled medicine man, Archie knew hundreds of plants and trees used for different types of healing, and he eagerly shared this wisdom with his children. He knew many ancient secrets for hunting and fishing, including the elaborate rituals of bear hunting. He was also well acquainted with the art of making bows and traditional Ojibwe birch-bark canoes.
When Archie’s father, Mike Mosay, died in 1971 at the age of 102, the communities of Round Lake and Balsam Lake were in a quandary as to how best to fill the vacuum left by his death. Mike Mosay had been the Grand Chief of the St. Croix Band and a central spiritual leader of his people. For a few years, the Medicine Dance was not conducted, as the people adjusted to the loss of their ceremonial chief.
In the early 1970s, an Ojibwe man from Round Lake approached Archie, offered him tobacco, and told him that his daughter would die if she could not be initiated into the Midewiwin. He begged Archie to help his girl, and eventually Archie acquiesced. Archie healed the man’s daughter and revived his father’s Midewiwin. From that point on, Archie assumed his father’s role in presiding over the Medicine Dance and speaking at Big Drum Ceremonies. Initially, John Stone of Lac Courte Oreilles and other Ojibwe spiritual leaders from Wisconsin and Minnesota helped Archie conduct his ceremonies. As time went on and other leaders died, Archie carried on the work alone, and increasing numbers of people traveled from other Ojibwe communities to participate in ceremonies at Round Lake and at Balsam Lake.
Shortly after his father’s death, Archie also assumed the honored position of Grand Chief of the St. Croix Ojibwe. The position had been in the family for several generations, and Archie carried the feather war bonnet and 1789 United States peace medallion, which had been passed on through his father, as proud symbols of that title and position.4
In all of his spiritual work, Archie used his first language, the only language he knew until a teenager, and, according to him, the only language intended for Ojibwe prayer—anishinaabemowin, the Ojibwe language. One day, Archie stepped outside of his ceremonial Medicine Lodge to lecture his helpers, saying, “I can’t use English in there. The Spirit doesn’t understand me when I use English.” This perspective also explains Archie’s focus on the importance of keeping the Ojibwe language alive. Without the language, there is no Midewiwin, no Big Drum, no Jiisakaan (Shake Tent Ceremony). Without the Ojibwe language, there is no Ojibwe culture.
At various times Archie fed his family by hunting and fishing and by working as a groundskeeper at Balsam Lake resorts and as a mason and a rations plant worker during World War II. For the bulk