Ojibwa

ETHNONYMS: Anishinaabe; Ojibway, Ojibwe; Chippewa (United States); Mississauga or Southeastern Ojibwa (southern, central Ontario), Nipissing, Algonquin, Plains Ojibwa (sometimes Bungi); Northern Ojibwa; Saulteaux or Sauteurs (Manitoba); Ojicree or Oji-Cree; Southwestern Chippewa

Orientation

Identification and Location. The Ojibwa live in numerous communities ranging mainly from southern and northwestern Ontario, northern Michigan and Wisconsin, and Minnesota to North Dakota and southern and central Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The most common explanation of the name "Ojibwa" relates it to a root meaning "puckered up," a reference to a distinct style of moccasin. Ojibwa speakers commonly refer to themselves as anishinaabeg, a term meaning "humans" (as opposed to nonhumans) or "Indians" (as opposed to whites).

Before European contact the Ojibwa homeland extended along the eastern and northern shores of Lake Huron, up the northeastern shore of Lake Superior, and probably into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In the 1600s and 1700s the Ojibwa expanded along fur trade water routes to the north and west. Those with ancient connections to Sault Sainte Marie were referred to as Saulteaux (people of the rapids), a term still widely used in Manitoba. Numerous other local group names have gone out of use or have lost their reference to a specific place. For example, in the 1600s the Mississauga (now an alternative term for the Southeastern Ojibwa) were a band residing near the Mississagi River on the northern shore of Lake Huron.

Demography. Estimates of the Ojibwa population at the time of European contact are speculative. Kroeber (1953) suggested a figure of 30,000 for the Northern Great Lakes, plus 2,000 for the Plains Ojibwa and 3,000 for the Ojibwa in Wisconsin. The Algonkin and Ottawa he grouped separately, at 7,300. By comparison, Rogers (1978) estimated all the Ojibwa-speaking groups in the Great Lakes homeland in the 1600s at about 3,000 to 4,000, while Peers (1994) noted a lack of evidence for an Ojibwa presence on the Plains before the late 1700s. From the 1630s onward smallpox, measles, and influenza epidemics periodically reduced native populations. The combined Canada-United States Ojibwa population in 1912 was reported to be 38,000 to 41,000. In 1986 the U.S. and Canadian populations registered as members of Ojibwa bands (Canada) or tribes (United States) totaled about 80,000. This does not include people categorized as Ottawa or Algonkin or nonstatus Indians or persons of mixed descent who may self-identify as Anishinaabeg. In Canada a governmental act that allows the recovery of Indian status by women who had lost status by marrying out and their children has led to a considerable increase in the numbers of registered Ojibwa.

Linguistic Affiliation. The Ojibwa language is a member of the Algonquian language family. It includes several dialects. Southern Ojibwa speakers include the Ottawas and Chippewas of southern Ontario, Manitoulin Island, and the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. To the east the Nipissing and Algonquin represent another speech community, and western and northern Ojibwa speakers may represent perhaps three dialectal variants. The Northern Ojibwa of the Severn River region (neighbors of the Swampy Cree) speak a dialect increasingly known as Ojicree or Oji-Cree; outsiders have identified these communities as Cree, a label sometimes adopted by those people when speaking English.

History and Cultural Relations

Recorded Ojibwa contacts with Europeans began in the 1640s in the Great Lakes region; French Jesuit missionaries first preached at Sault Sainte Marie in 1641. Iroquois warfare against the Huron and their Algonquian allies led to the destruction of the Huron confederacy in 1649 and to the wide dispersal of those communities. By the 1690s the Mississauga, the Ottawa, and others had defeated the Iroquois in several battles, and Mississauga villages began to occupy old Iroquois sites along the northern shore of Lake Ontario.

French fur traders began actively to pursue contacts with Algonquian communities around and beyond the upper Great Lakes to meet European demand for beaver felt for hats. French trade goods, especially kettles, knives, awls, and axes, drew strong Ojibwa interest for their convenience and durability and tended to replace or supplement bark and pottery containers and stone tools; cloth, trade beads, tobacco, and alcohol were also in demand. Dependency on European goods should not be assumed, however; the guns of the 1600s, for example, were unwieldy, inefficient, and dangerous to their users. The fur trade fostered specialization; Ojibwa winter hunting and trapping began to focus more on securing furs. The Ojibwa increasingly expected French traders to advance goods and provisions as "debts" to support fur production. Ojibwa women were essential as processors of leather and furs; their workload in this sphere increased as the trade grew, although metal tools facilitated many of their customary tasks.

By the late 1700s Ojibwa groups had spread into Manitoba, Minnesota, and beyond. Montreal-based Canadian traders were moving westward to compete with the English Hudson's Bay Company, which was extending its trade into the interior of the vast Hudson Bay watershed known as Rupert's Land, which it had claimed by royal charter since 1670. Many Ojibwa had long associated with the Canadians and frequently intermarried with them "according to the custom of the country." From the Great Lakes to the far Northwest a sizable population of mixed descent had arisen by the mid-1800s. Depending on circumstances, these people might remain with maternal relatives and identify as Ojibwa or might be connected with the growing number of Metis who began in this period to see themselves as ethnically distinct. The rise of the Plains Ojibwa dates to this period.

Ojibwa communities diverged in several other directions by 1850. Those who traveled with the fur trade into the subarctic regions above Lake Superior adopted a lifestyle closer to that of their northern neighbors, the Swampy Cree. Ojibwa communities in southern Ontario were displaced by Loyalists who streamed into the region after the American Revolution and later by thousands of immigrants from the British Isles. Governmental policy oscillated between encouraging Indian reserves and agricultural mission settlements in the south and removing Indians to more northern localities, such as Manitoulin Island.

The Ojibwa communities that spread into Wisconsin and Minnesota by the early 1800s did so largely by means of intermittent warfare with the Dakota and other groups and by allying themselves with Ottawa, Potawatomi, and increasingly Metis associates and relatives. By the 1850s their land base and population had been severely reduced by U.S. removal policies, disease, and pressure from white settlement, especially in more southern areas.

Settlements

Ojibwa settlements were largest during the summer, when people gathered at choice fishing and trading spots such as Sault Sainte Marie. The more southerly groups established durable villages on lakes and rivers, where they practiced small-scale agriculture, growing corn and other domesticated crops; stands of wild rice and sugar maple trees also attracted seasonal settlement. In the fall smaller kin groups consisting of, for example, two brothers and their wives and children, left the bigger lakes and rivers to canoe and portage inland, setting up winter camps in hunting and trapping lands that their families might have used for generations.

Dwellings varied seasonally. Conical or dome-shaped structures made of saplings bound together and covered with birch or elm bark or hides (depending on the region), later supplemented by canvas, were standard. Polygynous men and their families might occupy a peaked-roof long lodge with doors at both ends. Log or frame houses became common in more southern areas during the 1800s, but indigenous dwelling types were common along inland rivers and lakes in northern Ontario and Manitoba through the 1930s.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities.

The Ojibwa economy was mixed, combining the seasonal harvesting of wild resources (fish, game, birchbark, berries, plant medicines, and other local products) with gardening (in the south) and trade. Management of these resources by fire and other methods enhanced productivity; wild rice, for example, was reseeded where old beds had declined and was introduced to new locations where conditions were promising. The rise of the fur trade brought an increased emphasis on beaver, muskrat, and other pelts and encouraged the production of maple sugar and wild rice for trade. Fish, notably whitefish, and more specialized products such as sturgeon isinglass acquired commercial value, leading to competition in several areas between Ojibwa groups and outside entrepreneurs; overfishing by those entrepreneurs led to massive depletions in several areas by 1900. The Plains Ojibwa turned more to bison hunting, although they maintained mixed seasonal use of other resources and did not become as oriented to horses as did other Plains groups.

Industrial Arts. The processing of leather, bark, plant fibers, wood, stone, clay, and to a lesser degree native copper from around Lake Superior yielded a diverse material culture; for the Ojibwa of the Plains the bison furnished hides, pemmican, and other useful products. On arrival, European traders in the Northeast and the subarctic region found canoes, snowshoes, and moccasins essential to travel and increased the demand for these goods. The metal goods they introduced greatly facilitated woodcutting, cooking, and sewing, and glass trade beads, silk thread, and recycled materials such as snuffbox lids made into tinkling cones augmented traditional decorative materials such as porcupine quills. By the later 1800s basketry and beadwork became a significant source of income for Ojibwa women in areas frequented by tourists, sports fishermen, and cottagers.

Trade. The Europeans found the Ojibwa already engaged in trade with the Huron to the south and the Cree to the north; goods such as cornmeal and Iroquoian pottery moved north, while furs for winter clothing traveled south along old trade routes that reached from the southern Great Lakes to James Bay. The French fur trade cast Ojibwa, Nipissing, and Algonquin groups into middleman roles as conveyors of high-quality Cree beaver pelts to Montreal and Quebec. By the 1700s French forts and missions on the Great Lakes became magnets for trade and to some extent settlement, fostering the rise of an Ojibwa-Metis population. In the north trapping remained important through the middle of the twentieth century, and it still augments income from other sources.

Division of Labor. Most hunting, trapping, and trading was done by men; women's work centered on child care, gathering firewood and berries and other plants, and processing leather, clothing, and food. Older men assumed the most prominent leadership and ceremonial roles.

Land Tenure. Land tenure was established by continued use and habitation of village sites and by local consensus about which family groups frequented specific lakeshores and streams in the winter hunting season. Patterns of water travel and watersheds shaped land use in most areas, and concepts of trespass and respect for occupancy rights reinforced the stability of use patterns except when disruptive rivalry with other groups occurred, as in the upper Midwest "debatable zone" between the Ojibwa and the Dakota in the late 1700s and early 1800s. By the late 1800s land cessions and the creation of reservations, along with fish, game, and migratory bird laws, the damming of rivers, and other changes, had undermined Ojibwa land use patterns in all but the most northerly communities.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. Patrilineal exogamous clans structured Ojibwa kin relations in most areas, though clan solidarity and functions were more visible in southern regions. The Southwestern Ojibwa of Minnesota had twenty-three clans, while fifteen or twenty were reported for the Lake Superior Chippewa in the 1800s. Among the Berens River Ojibwa in the 1930s seven clans were reported. The Northern Ojibwa, in contrast, developed regional bands traceable to a remote genealogical ancestor, such as the Cranes in the area of Weagamow and Big Trout lakes.

Kinship Terminology. Ojibwa kinship follows a bifurcate collateral pattern with Iroquois-type cousin terminology, distinguishing cross cousins from parallel cousins, aunts, and uncles and merging parallel cousins with siblings.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Although parents commonly arranged the marriages of their children, liberal courtship customs allowed eligible mates (ideally classificatory cross cousins) to form relationships that were sanctioned as marriages. A man's presentation of gifts to the woman's parents and their acceptance allowed a marriage to go forward. Temporary matrilocal residence was common and might be lasting if the wife's parents lacked other male hunters. Polygyny was not usual, but men who achieved power and prestige might have two or three wives or, rarely, more. Divorce was permitted, as was remarriage after divorce or the death of a spouse.

Domestic Unit. Residential units consisted of long lodges occupied by extended families that often included three generations or, in the summer, clusters of smaller dwellings occupied by related families that dispersed into smaller groups for winter hunting. By the early 1900s log and frame nuclear-family housing prevailed in most areas. Nuclear family units, however, still often house one or more grandparents as well as children adopted or fostered because they need a home, because the home needs children, or both.

Inheritance. Clear gender roles led to women's property being passed down to female descendants, and men's down to males. Ceremonial properties, religious powers, and leadership roles usually passed down the male line but also were legitimated by appropriate vision experiences and the demonstration of suitable personal qualities.

Socialization. Children learned gender and adult roles largely by experience, observation, example, and stories and legends rather than through formal teaching or discipline. Boys at puberty sought gifts and blessings from dream visitors by fasting in isolation for several days. Thunderbirds or other beings might bestow powers that helped men throughout life if they were respected and obeyed. Girls at first menstruation were secluded, but vision experiences, while they might occur and confer special powers, were not sought or needed by females to the same degree. Women after puberty observed various taboos on the handling of men's tools and products of the hunt, and all children learned customary patterns of respect, avoidance, or joking relationships toward different classes of relatives.

Sociopolitical Organization

Social Organization. Ojibwa communities consisted of local autonomous bands of interrelated families that often were known by a name reflecting a geographic feature of their territory, such as rapids or a river mouth. More southerly bands ranged up to several hundred people; those living on the Canadian Shield had perhaps 50 to 150 persons. By the late 1800s many bands, especially on the Plains, consisted of an ethnic mix of Ojibwa, Ottawa, Cree, Metis, and Dakota or others.

Political Organization. Leadership in Ojibwa bands commonly passed down the male lines of large, successful families. The men and, more rarely, women who gained leadership were respected for their abilities, knowledge, and evidence of spiritual powers in hunting, healing, or other domains. Younger leaders might be successful warriors, and older men might demonstrate shamanic powers that attracted allegiance from members of their families or communities but appeared frightening and evil to outsiders such as missionaries, who became their rivals in some respects, or to potential enemies. By the late 1800s outside pressures fostered more formalized chiefly roles, especially in Canada, where the Indian Act of 1876 required the election of chiefs and councils. Elections and majority rule at least nominally replaced older, more consensual political processes. Tensions between young and old, Christian and nonconverted, and "progressive" and "conservative" grew; while generational and civilchief/warrior rivalries were not new, factionalism was exacerbated by social and economic stress.

Social Control. Ridicule, gossip, and ostracism were the principal means of social control. Persons who manifested the threatening behavior of a cannibalistic wiindigoo or a "bearwalker" who pursued others with bad medicine might be executed. It was expected that wrongdoers and breakers of taboos would bring penalties from offended spiritual beings upon themselves or their children (onjinewin, punishment for a moral wrong), obviating need for human intervention.

Conflict. Strong sanctions controlled overt expressions of conflict and anger. Direct conflict usually was deflected through avoidance or silence; if it was not defused, antagonists might resort to indirect warfare, "throwing bad medicine" through sorcery. The introduction of alcohol evidently decreased inhibitions on physical abuse and violence. Stresses in modern reservation communities have exacerbated generational conflicts. Old mechanisms of control have broken down, and high youth suicide rates in northern Ontario testify to widespread problems in parent-child communications and to drastic changes in values related to individual behavior, agency, and responsibility.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Ojibwa cosmology, reinforced by language, presents a universe filled with beings and forces conceived of as animate and capable of interacting with human beings. To speak of thunder, for example, is to speak of the Thunderers or Thunderbirds (animikiig or pinesiwag ), beings who require respect and offerings and may help humans and visit them in dreams. Objects and animals may not be what they seem; certain stones may speak and have powers, or a seemingly ordinary creature may be a spirit visitor in human or animal form. Debate exists over whether the Ojibwa had a pre-Christian concept of a supreme god (gichi-manidoo, Great Spirit), but along the Berens River non-Christians spoke of a remote, ungendered unseen power, gaa-dibendjiged from whom powers emanated to all other beings in varying degrees. Animals, plants, the four winds, and other natural phenomena had spiritual "owners" or "bosses" who appeared in myths and dreams and controlled human relationships with the entities they represented.

In the nineteenth century intensive missionization by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and others began, particularly in the more southern regions. The results varied widely. Churches and schools built within Ojibwa communities allowed children a degree of familial continuity and contact with elders and gave the Ojibwa opportunities to assimilate aspects of Christianity on their own terms. When, in the late 1800s, perhaps a third to a half of the rising generation was sent to distant boarding schools, old belief systems were lost in many instances. Since the late 1900s Ojibwa traditionalists have tried to revive religious beliefs of the past in a framework of a broader pan-Indian spirituality, while Christians commonly turn to the evangelical and Pentecostal churches active on many reservations.

Religious Practitioners. Young people who received special gifts on their vision quests and support and teaching from powerful older relatives became shamans with various specialties, such as healing or divining future or distant events through the use of the shaking tent (a small structure in which the operator communed with visiting spirit beings and received answers to questions and problems) or conducting Midewiwin (Grand Medicine Society) ceremonies.

Ceremonies. The Midewiwin, which was prominent among most southern and central Ojibwa until Christianization and other forces diminished its practice and then was revived in the late 1900s, was the most prominent ceremony. Held in spring and/or fall in a long lodge built for that purpose, it was an occasion for reciting origin and migration myths, healing, and initiating new members. More generally, individual and group ceremonies infused everyday life; the harvesting of game or roots, the naming of a child, or the passing of a thunderstorm were occasions for prayers and offerings. Innovations occurred through dream messages that individual recipients received and promulgated. In the late 1800s, for example, a Dream Dance involving the use of a large drum and the transmission of an elaborate song cycle spread across Minnesota and Wisconsin and eventually to the Berens River in Manitoba.

Arts. Musical instruments included rattles, flutes, water drums, and large drums such as those of the Dream Dance and those used more recently in powwows. Individuals received songs from dream visitors who conferred powers to heal, secure success in hunting, or conduct certain ceremonies. Inscribed and painted arts included migration stories and song notations on birchbark Midewiwin scrolls and pictographs on rock faces above water, as at Agawa on Lake Superior. In the 1960s Ojibwa artists led by Norval Morrisseau created the pictographic or "Woodland" school of native painting. Using leather and cloth, Ojibwa women have a long tradition of porcupine quillwork, silkwork, and beadwork, most commonly using floral motifs; birchbark basketry is also a widely used medium for quillwork.

Medicine. Serious illness was ascribed to personalized causes: retaliation from offended spirit beings or sorcery for improper behavior or for having done wrong to an animal or a person. Curing could involve a specialist's use of medicinal plant remedies, the sweat lodge, the Midewiwin ceremony, and a shaman's aid in soliciting the victim's confession of past taboo breaches or other acts that might have brought about the ailment.

Death and Afterlife. The deceased were dressed in fine clothes, wrapped in bark, and buried (or in older times when the ground was frozen, placed on high scaffolds) with the goods needed on the journey to the afterworld. Southern Ojibwa groups placed the land of the dead or of ghosts (jiibayag ) to the west; Berens River Ojibwa placed it in the south. A small log house or picket fence was placed over the grave, and relatives left offerings such as tea or tobacco for the deceased or for the use of others who might visit to pay their respects. Reincarnation was seen as possible though rare; clues would be a few gray hairs on a baby's head or a person's recollection of experiences while in the womb or before.

For the original article on the Ojibwa, see Volume 1, North America.

Bibliography

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JENNIFER S. H. BROWN

Ojibwa Native Americans who formerly inhabited the territory around Lake Superior in North America. The Ojibwa were hunters and fishers as well as subsistence farmers, and were constantly feuding with the Sioux. They also developed a unique form of picture-writing. During the 17th century they expanded their territory as far as North Dakota, and became one of the largest indigenous peoples of North America. Since the early 19th century they have been living on reservations in the states of North Dakota, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

O·jib·wa / ōˈjibˌwā; -wə/ (also O·jib·way / -ˌwā/ ) • n. (pl. same or -was or -ways) 1. a member of a North American Indian people native to the region around Lake Superior. Also called Chippewa. 2. the Algonquian language of this people. • adj. of or relating to this people or their language.

Ojibwa (Chippewa) Group of Algonquian-speaking Native North Americans. In the 17th century, they were constantly at war with the Sioux, eventually driving them across the Mississippi River. Since then, they have lived on reservations in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota. Today, c.90,000 live in the USA and Canada.

Ojibwa •Aconcagua •aqua, sub-aqua •Chihuahua, Kurosawa, Massawa, Okinawa, Tokugawa •Qwaqwa • Quechua •Chichewa, rewarewa •Ojibwa • Interlingua • siliqua • Iowa •Medawar • Te Kanawa • Ottawa