Post # 90
As I said in addendum to my last post, I was at another reenactment last weekend. It was a very small turn out for an event that used to have well over 300 camps. This year it was only about 20 - 25 camps. It has dwindled down over the years quite considerably. Nevertheless I had a great time with good friends. It took me a couple of hours to set up the wigwam and almost another hour to move everything in and set it all up just right, and then get into my period attire. Then I headed down to the tavern to play music with the Band.
I had a great time with old friends, and got acquainted with some new friends. Throughout Saturday and Sunday I wandered around the site interpreting a slice of history to the public. I went into the North West Company fur post with a bundle of furs, and set up a trading treaty with the bourgeois and the village I represent. I only spoke Ojibwe to them, so they required an interpreter. The public learned a lot by this display.
Below is my picture. This is how I appeared in the fur post. I portray a warrior of the eastern Ojibwe, just like my ancestors were. This is basically how I always dress at these events. One thing people often ask me is what "tribe" I am from. I tell them I am Ojibwe (otherwise known as "Chippewa"). They then say, "well you don't look like an Ojibwe. You look more like a Huron, or an Iroquois." Then I reply, "I am eastern Ojibwe, from the area just to the west of Aadawe-ziibi - the Ottawa River. We dress very similarly." There still are some factors though, that stand out as Ojibwe, but they are details that a waabi-dengway wouldn't recognize.
A close up
A people tends to dress like their neighbors, even if they don't like them very well. It is just one of the quirky facts about human nature. After I make this point I usually go on to talk about the eastern Ojibwe, and who they are, and how they came to be there.
I start with an explanation about the early history of the Ojibwe people. Long before the arrival of the waabi-dengway (white faces) we were workers of misko-waabik - red metal (copper). The ancestors of the Ojibwe and all the Anishinaabe people had been working copper for many thousands of years. We made copper axes, spears, fish hooks, knives arrowheads, and body ornaments and neck armor. It would make sense even that we were probably working it before those in the old world, here in the Lake Superior region there are huge veins of pure copper. There is also much shore copper, and a geologic oddity called "float copper." When the float copper came forth, the earth's fires were so hot and violent that it was actually boiling, and it was filled with many bubbles of air. This made the copper buoyant. The crews of Great Lakes ships have talked about seeing it floating out in the lake. Every so often some of it washes up on shore.
The Old World copper was all in the form of an ore. This means it all had to be smelted. This also means that the smelting process had to be accidentally discovered. We, on the other hand had copper in its pure form, all ready to make stuff out of it. The Europeans often look upon us as primitive and backward. They should know that at the time the Indo-Europeans entered Europe (about 2000 to 1900 BC) we had already been working the red metal for thousands of years, but they were still just breaking rocks.
The Anishinaabe people ended up on the north east coast of North America. A very long time later, we began to migrate (probably due to harsh weather changes) southward and then westward.. We went to Labrador Island, and the ancestors of the Southern Anishinaabe nations went to Massachusetts. From there they went down to Virginia, and the Carolinas, and others went westward from the Ohio River Valley to the southern side of the Great lakes. The northern Anishinaabe moved into Maine, and some went westward across Canada (Cree, Micmac, Naskapi), and the Algonquin went along the St. Lawrence River and the Northern side of the Great Lakes to the northern part of lower Michigan, and into Ontario along the entire Ottawa River watershed.
One branch of the Algonquin set themselves up as traders. They started as just trading our copperwork with the other nations, but after a while they became the middle men for all kinds of trading between the various peoples of the region. This is why they are called the Aadawe or Ottawa, which is the Ojibwe word for trading.
After the arrival of the French, and then the other Waabi-dengway we were all able to get things made of biiwaabik (iron). We were also introduced to the wabowaayan - woven hides (cloth) in its many forms from shirts to blankets. For both the warrior and the hunter, we really loved the bashkizigan (the musket). The fur posts had to keep accurate records of all that they traded, and by 1675 we (the Ojibwe) had more guns than the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish combined. The Iroquois had even more than that. I'm getting ahead of myself though.
After the fur trade got into full swing the Iroquois and the Huron broke their treaties with us and combined to attack the Algonquin. They had gotten infected with the greed of Europe, and they wanted to have all the trade goods for themselves, so they started to attack us in our villages, to try and drive us out. Many of the Algonquin made the crossing over to Upper Michigan.
Not long after arriving there we had one of our hunting parties attacked by a band of Sac and Fox. We brought the wounded back to camp, and then went out hunting again - this time for that war party. We caught up with them. It is way easier to just kill people in battle than it is to capture them, but we captured them. We brought them back to camp, and had them sewed up into green deer hides (wet rawhide). We did this to all but two of them, who we made watch all this. Then the ones sewn up were hung over a fire, but high enough that they wouldn't burn. They suffocated in the same way one does from the coils of a boa constrictor. According to the two survivors, we left them hang there until they could hear their bones crunch.
We then let the other two go, but they had to pass through the "gauntlet" first. when they got back to their people and told them what had happened, the Fox and Sac were horrified. They called us then "roast until puckered." (pucker - ojib ; and bwa, which means to roast) That is how and when we got our name. By this time we were already primarily a gun powder civilization (from William Warren's book "The History of the Ojibwe People" - written in 1848, finally published in 1885).
By 50 or so years later, we were well established along the South Shore of Lake Superior. Then the explorer Daniel Greysolon seur Duluht, came and established a treaty between us and the Dakota living in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Three Ojibwe boys went to Mille Lacs, and three Dakota boys went to live with us in what today is Ashland Wisconsin in the area near Jean Baptiste Cadeaux's fur post (point of note: Cadeaux married an Ojibwe woman, and so did his sons, grandsons, and so forth all the way down the line. By the time of the forming of the North West Fur Company, the Cadeaux family was still operating that fur post, and they were by then only French by name. By that time though, they had changed the spelling of their name to Cadot. Since then other descendents have changed the name to Cadotte. They also became "Partners" in the NWCo. William Warren was one of their descendents.).
One day a wounded Fox warrior came into an Ojibwe camp, and told them how he had been a prisoner, along with another Fox and two Menominie. They were prisoners of the Dakota in Mille Lacs, but only he had escaped alive. He told them there that the three boys had been brutally murdered and brutalized, and their bodies had been desecrated. This was the last straw for many of the other nations living in the area. That summer the Ojibwe, the Fox and Sac, the Menominie, the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk), the Pottawatomie, the Ottawa, and the Assiniboine all descended upon the Dakota like wolves onto a deer. When it was all over the Dakota had been utterly defeated, and pushed out all the way across the Red River into the Dakotas, and south beyond the Minnesota and Wisconsin Rivers. When Radisson came to the area to do follow up work for DuLuht a short time later, everything he was told to expect had completely changed (this also comes from William Warren's book).
By this time the Iroquois in their war of greed had already turned on their Iroquoian brothers, the Huron, and had pushed them as far as Lake Pepin (eastern Minnesota). The next place their greed led them was across to upper Michigan and beyond. They attacked at both Ashland and Bayfield, Wisconsin. We, along with the Fox, Sac, Menominie, and a couple others beat them all the way back to the end of the Upper Penninsula, so they retreated across to lower Michigan. The Fox and Sac, and others were satisfied with this and went home victorious. Among the Ojibwe however, there were many who were still alive, who had experienced being pushed out of lower Michigan.during the Huron Wars, the first leg of what became known as the Beaver Wars. While still on a roll, and hyped up from a successful battle many ogichidaag (warriors) decided that wasn't good enough. We continued the chase, and pushed them all the way across lower Michigan, across lower Ontario, and across and all the way back to New York. By this time winter was setting in, so we lived with the Ottawa for the winter. Many of us took Ottawa wives and settled in the region west of the Ottawa River. That is how a people who became a separate nation in Upper Michigan, came to live also so far east. This is also the story of my ancestry, and the story of my historical persona.
Wearing a fancy eastern "gentleman's coat" or "Chief's Coat" and a turban with assorted feathers in the style of Joseph Brandt.
