History, Department of

 

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

4-2021

Citation

Ethnohistory (April 2021) 68(2): 215–236

doi: 10.1215/00141801-8801840

Comments

Copyright © 2021, American Society for Ethnohistory. Published by Duke University Press. Used by permission

Abstract

Ojibwe leaders negotiated treaties with the United States amid nineteenth-century encroachments on their territory. These treaties, which were more than tools of dispossession, enfolded and extended aadizookanag (sacred stories) in agreements that embodied Ojibwe relationships with land, language, sacred history, ceremony, and kin. Federal and state policy makers, fueled by the desire for Indian land and resources, attempted to unravel these relationships in the decades that followed. By continuing to live out through labor and stories their relationships with the woods, waters, and manoomin (wild rice) beds of Anishinaabewaki, the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibweg kept their treaties and their sovereignty alive.

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