Ojibwe

Around the upper Great Lakes, from Michigan and Ontario west to Minnesota and the Canadian prairies, live the Ojibwe, one of the largest Indigenous nations in North America. They belong to the wider Anishinaabe family of peoples, speak an Algonquian language, and are also known as Ojibway, Chippewa, Saulteaux and, in southern Ontario, Mississauga. Their homeland is sometimes called Ojibwewaki.

Where the name Ojibwe comes from is uncertain. Suggested meanings include a reference to puckered, fire-cured moccasin seams, to people who keep records in pictures, or a Cree term for people who speak "stiffly". Chippewa is the usual form in the United States and Ojibway in Canada, while many communities now prefer Anishinaabe. Because many Ojibwe once lived by the rapids the French called Sault Ste. Marie, colonists called them Saulteurs, the source of the name Saulteaux.

Ojibwe oral history, also recorded on birchbark scrolls, tells of a long migration from the Atlantic coast near the mouth of the St Lawrence. Guided by sacred miigis (cowrie) shells, the people moved west in a series of "stopping places", among them Manitoulin Island, Sault Ste. Marie and the western end of Lake Superior, until they reached "the place where there is food upon the waters", the wild-rice country around Chequamegon in today's Wisconsin.

French Jesuit missionaries first mention the Ojibwe in their report of 1640. Close trading ties with French traders gave the Ojibwe guns and European goods. Allied with the Odawa and Potawatomi in the Council of Three Fires, they checked the advance of the Haudenosaunee near Lake Superior in 1662 and later pushed them out of southern Ontario and Michigan. To the west they drove Dakota groups out of the upper Mississippi region. By the late eighteenth century they held most of Michigan, northern Wisconsin and Minnesota and the northern shores of Lakes Huron and Superior.

The Ojibwe fought beside the French in the Seven Years' War and later sided with Britain in the War of 1812, hoping to halt American settlement. Afterwards the United States tried to move the Ojibwe west of the Mississippi; in the Sandy Lake Tragedy several hundred died after promised annuity payments were not delivered. Resistance, led in part by Chief Buffalo (Kechewaishke), allowed bands to remain on reservations within their ceded lands. In Canada the Ojibwe negotiated the Robinson Treaties of 1850 and several of the numbered treaties from 1871. Many treaties guaranteed continued hunting, fishing and gathering, and how they should be read, given very different ideas about land ownership, is still argued in the courts.

Most Ojibwe, apart from the Plains bands, lived in settled communities, fishing, hunting, growing maize and squash, making maple sugar and harvesting manoomin, wild rice, from canoes. They lived in birchbark wigwams. Society was organised into clans (doodemag) named after animals, such as Crane and Bear; people married outside their own clan, and clan leaders formed band councils. The Midewiwin society kept knowledge in pictorial writing on birchbark scrolls. The dreamcatcher grew out of an Ojibwe protective charm for infants, and the jingle dress worn by women dancers at powwows is an Ojibwe creation.

The Ojibwe number roughly 320,000. The 2010 United States census recorded about 170,000 people of Chippewa descent, and around 160,000 people in Canada belonged to some 200 Ojibwe bands as of 2014. Communities stretch from western Quebec to eastern British Columbia and across Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana. Most fluent speakers of Anishinaabemowin are elders, and language revitalisation has grown since the early 2000s. Bodies such as the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission manage treaty harvesting rights, and in 2018 the White Earth Band adopted the "rights of manoomin" to protect wild rice.

Our maps for 1530, 1600, 1650 and 1700 draw an approximate Ojibwe territory, labelled "Obiwa", around the upper Great Lakes. On the 1650 map it borders the Cree and the Assiniboine to the north and north-west, and the Santee and Yanktonai divisions of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux) to the west.