Anishinaabe Peoples

Anishinaabe is what these peoples call themselves, and the grouping is theirs rather than an outsider's. At its core is the Council of Three Fires, the alliance of the Ojibwe, the Odawa and the Potawatomi, whose relationship is described in their own accounts as three brothers with distinct responsibilities: the Ojibwe as keepers of the faith, the Odawa as traders, the Potawatomi as keepers of the fire.

The wider term takes in the Mississaugas, the Saulteaux, the Nipissing and the Algonquin. Their territory runs around the upper Great Lakes on both sides of the Canada and United States border, a border drawn across them rather than by them, and the migration story recorded in their oral history brings them west from the Atlantic coast to the place where food grows on water, which is wild rice.

Ojibwe and Chippewa are the same word spelled two ways, the second being the form that entered United States treaty language, which is why both appear in legal documents and why the same nation can be listed under two names in two countries. Wild rice is not incidental to that story. Manoomin is food, it is the destination named in the migration account, and it is at the centre of present legal argument in Minnesota and Wisconsin over water quality and treaty rights, so a sacred plant is also a matter before the courts.

The Midewiwin, usually translated as the Grand Medicine Society, is the institution most often written about from outside, and it is a society with degrees, with instruction, with fees and with conditions of entry rather than a general folk practice. Its teachings concern healing, conduct and the path a person takes, and they were recorded on birchbark scrolls incised with mnemonic figures, which functioned as an aid to a trained memory rather than as a script anyone could read cold. A number of those scrolls survive in museum collections, and their custody, like that of many objects taken during the same period, is a matter the communities have raised.

Basil Johnston, an Anishinaabe writer from Wasauksing First Nation, published accounts of this material in English from inside the tradition, which is why the atlas cites him here rather than an outside ethnography of the same ground. The wider tradition includes the seven grandfather teachings, the clan system, and a body of narrative about Nanabozho. What belongs to initiates is named as belonging to initiates and is not reproduced. Anishinaabemowin, the language itself, is central to all of it, and immersion schools on both sides of the border have been built specifically because the teachings are held to be inseparable from the language they were given in.