The Red River Country in Ojibwe

 

The Red River and some important associated locations. Pembina is located where the Red crosses the US-Canadian border, and Portage la Prairie and Long Plain Reserve #6 are located on the Assiniboine south and southwest of Lake Manitoba. The “double” lake in Minnesota east of Grand Forks and south of Lake of the Woods is Red Lake. (Modified from Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-SA 2.5.)

The Red River of the North is born south of Fargo-Moorhead on the Minnesota-North Dakota border and flows north for 550 miles, passing through Winnipeg, before emptying into Lake Winnipeg. Its banks and watershed have been of great historical importance—a history in which Ojibwe-speaking peoples have played a pivotal role. The Red River country was the site of long-term fur trading and a particularly rich mixture of peoples and cultures—Crees and Anishinaabeg, Assiniboines, Frenchmen and Scots, and more. This mixture created some friction, but also promoted various alliances, and it was a huge factor in giving birth to the Métis people. This was the site of the Selkirk Colony and Pembina; it was the arena of the Pemmican War and the first Métis uprising under Louis Riel and the creation of Manitoba. Anishinaabeg, from Minnesota Ojibwes to Lake Huron Odawas, sojourned or settled here as they gradually pushed onto the Plains and became today’s Saulteaux (or Plains Ojibwes).

For all its significance, I’m unaware of any commonly shared Ojibwe term for the broader Red River country, but in this post I’d like to briefly delve into the closest thing that I’ve found.

Wikipedia Sucks

Last updated: July 17, 2023

I am concerned by how ubiquitous is the practice of practically everyone, including plenty of otherwise reasonable, intelligent people, quoting or citing or linking to Wikipedia for this or that fact or claim or subject. Wikipedia is certainly not useless, and for just quickly telling someone what a concept is, a link to the relevant Wikipedia article is often fine. But the problem with overdoing this, the problem with relying on Wikipedia in general—and especially for any details—is that Wikipedia sucks.

I realize this is not some novel claim. Problems with Wikipedia have been pointed out for its entire existence, but my impression is that far, far too many people may in theory say that it has some issues, but still continue to treat it as a basically reliable resource. Yet if I look at any article concerning a subject where I have some expertise or even some familiarity, in literally almost every single case (genuinely the only exception I can think of is the article on wolves) I find the article riddled with inaccuracies, ignorance, confusion, biases, and sourcing/citation failures of various sorts. And these are not minor issues, but pervasive, devastating problems that frequently render the article worthless. It’s also possible to spot some of these problems in articles where I don’t know anything about the subject, but not always. I have to assume, though, that the vast majority of articles are like this, though certain subject areas, such as most of the hard sciences, seem to be better than others.

To help drive the point home, in this post, I’d like to illustrate Wikipedia’s (as well as Wiktionary’s) suckiness with a few key examples. These are just examples I happened to stumble upon, or which friends have shared with me, and are arranged vaguely (though not totally consistently) in increasing order of detail and seriousness. They could easily be multiplied ad infinitum. Feel free to add your own favorite example(s) in the comments!

Playing His Own Game: A Squanto Post

Last updated: October 8, 2023

Squanto sought his owne ends, and plaid his owne game

—Bradford, Of Plim̃oth Plantation (OPP), pg. 71, spelling slightly modernized

Introduction

If you’re a white American and you’re like me, the sum total of your childhood knowledge of the First Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims, and the Indian named Squanto was probably something like this:

Like the settlers at Jamestown, the Pilgrims at Plymouth endured a “starving time.” Half the group died during the first winter. However, they were saved by Native Americans who had learned to speak English. Squanto, a Native American, taught the Pilgrims how to plant native crops.

Sometime in the fall of 1621 the Plymouth settlement celebrated a good harvest by holding a three-day feast. It was the first Thanksgiving in New England. This Thanksgiving came to represent the peace that existed at that time between the Native Americans and Pilgrims.

This is from Dallek et al. (2008:68), a textbook for grades 6-8. For the most part this passage isn’t strictly incorrect. It is, however, both boring and terribly incomplete. It doesn’t just leave out things like the fact that there’s no such thing as “the Native Americans” as some monolithic block (“the peace that existed at the time between the Native Americans and Pilgrims” certainly didn’t exist between the Pilgrims and all local Indian groups!), or how it came to be that some Indians had learned to speak English (in Squanto’s case, enslavement!), but it leaves out characters, which is the main thing that makes it boring. We have a passage with dozens of people dying horrible deaths, but there’s no pathos and no names or stories to actually bring home the fact that human lives have been lost. We also have a passage in which only one person, Squanto (whom I’ll now be calling “Tisquantum,” for reasons to be explained), is named, but in which he is certainly not a “character.” Other historically important characters, from Massasoit and Hobbamock to William Bradford and Edward Winslow, are not mentioned at all. Tisquantum pops into existence briefly in order to move the English people’s story along by teaching them how to plant crops (YAWN!), then vanishes again. His personality is never described, nor any of his other actions, nor are his motivations examined. (Nor for that matter are those of any of the other Indians—why did the Pokanoket chief Massasoit choose to help the English colony survive, for instance?)

But Tisquantum was very much a full-fledged character, a three-dimensional human being. The greatest sin in the traditional accounts of Indian history and Indian-white relations is the denial of agency to Indians—they are nothing but people to whom events happen, and they enter the narrative when interacting with whites, but their own responses to the situations in which they find themselves are never considered. This is true of the well-meaning but flawed “noble savage” and “poor oppressed Indians” narratives as well as the even less savory ones. Indians were obviously terribly treated and oppressed in multitudinous ways by European colonizing forces, but the overall series of processes by which this happened was complex, and Indian people did not just sit around passively allowing this to happen—they made reasonable and deliberate personal, economic, social, and political choices at every stage, even if they often had limited options and even if these choices often proved, with hindsight, not to lead to the desired consequences.

Only comparatively recently have non-Indian historians begun to examine historical events in which Indians took part with an eye toward the Indians’ own experiences and choices. And sadly, such an outlook still remains essentially absent from school curricula and thus popular culture. The story of Tisquantum and other southern New England Native peoples is a prime example in which Indians were clearly making calculated decisions and choices. For all their faults and their chauvinistic attitudes towards Indians, Bradford and other Pilgrims who knew Tisquantum were able to recognize this—and to be able to conclude that Tisquantum “sought his own ends and played his own game.”

Cat Eye Lake Clocks and Ojibwe Metaphors

Last updated: July 1, 2023

Single Algonki[a]n words are like tiny imagist poems.

—Sapir, Language, pg. 244

[Note: I don’t have great confidence that everything here will turn out to be correct. I’m not an expert on metaphors, nor am I a fluent speaker of Ojibwe, just a learner. Also, while I seem to pick on one researcher here a lot, it’s only because his paper is the main thing I know of that makes a certain claim and which I have access to. It’s not my purpose to attack him in particular.]

Text #27, “Cats’ Eyes,” is one of the shortest texts in Leonard Bloomfield’s grammar of Odawa (which he labeled “Eastern Ojibwa”). Like all of the texts it was narrated in 1938 by Andrew Medler, who was born in Saginaw, MI but lived most of his life on Walpole Island, ON, and in it Medler offers an explanation for an unusual Odawa expression.

Albert Gatschet Ojibwe Materials: 1878 Bottineau Vocabulary

Last updated: January 5, 2023

NOTE: I no longer hold certain of the opinions expressed in this post; in particular, I now believe Jean Bottineau could basically speak Ojibwe perfectly well, even if maybe not completely fluently and even if his stronger languages were French and English. I also strongly suspect that his father and paternal relatives had a significant influence on his acquisition of Ojibwe (and Cree).

Introduction

Hi there. If you thought some of my last posts were long, STRAP IN.

In the course of doing research on an upcoming post, I’ve been reading through several Ojibwe wordlists and texts collected by the Swiss linguist and anthropologist Albert S. Gatschet in the late 19th century and currently held in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. To my knowledge none of them have been published anywhere, although scholars are certainly aware of their existence and words from them have been cited in various places. As a public service, I decided to transcribe and publish the content of (at least some of) the materials here so it’s easier for anyone who wants to reference them in the future. (Photographs of the manuscripts in question are online, so anyone wishing to look at the originals can do so, which is how I’ve been able to read them in the first place.) In many cases these documents, despite generally being relatively short, also offer some interesting areas to explore.

This post will deal with the chronologically earliest material, a 23-page wordlist comprising a variety of mostly basic vocabulary along with some clan names, band names and locations, and a very small handful of ethnographic notes, which was collected on May 28, 1878 from from Jean Baptiste Bottineau, a 41-year-old lawyer of Ojibwe and French ancestry from the Pembina/Turtle Mountain Band, and is found in NAA Manuscript 68, which also contains data collected by Gatschet from several other languages and sources.

The Bottineau vocabulary, consisting as it does mainly of basic vocabulary, might be thought to not be of particular interest in and of itself, as almost all the words can be found in other sources as well. However, there are some interesting points which can be noted concerning Gatschet’s field methods as well as Bottineau’s dialect, translation choices, and actual competence in Ojibwe, which I will discuss here.

On Wolves and the Importance of Honesty

Last updated: November 30, 2023

Preface

Timothy Treadwell was a 46-year-old but boyishly enthusiastic man from New York-by-way-of-California who loved bears. For over a decade he camped among grizzly bears (brown bears, Ursus arctos) every summer and early autumn in the Alaskan wilderness, mainly in Katmai National Park, becoming acquainted with all the individual bears, anthropomorphizing them and giving them cutesy names, befriending other native wildlife like foxes. He traveled to schools and appeared on television programs—including Letterman and a Discovery Channel special—to teach people that bears were maligned, misunderstood animals, gentle giants. He approached “his” bears very closely, insisted that he had established a bond and mutual trust with them, and that they were his friends. He was clearly rather naïve, but he also clearly meant well and clearly cared very deeply for these animals.

On October 5, 2003, the final day of that season’s camping in Katmai, Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were slowly mauled to death and partially consumed by a grizzly. That bear, and one other bear, were shot dead by rangers and State Troopers the following day. And the world read headlines, and later watched a critically acclaimed Werner Herzog film, about how a bear killed two people.