Brother Wolf, in Ojibwe know as Ma'iingan: PBS Wisconsin Documentary from March 2019

[Music] [Music] doing indian doll my anusnabe name is rising sun was given to me by a bad river elder many years ago i'm eagle clan i'm of the uh bad river band of lake superior ojibwe and a member of the grand medicine lodge the monday win [Music] it's good to be here with you today i've been given seymour indian tobacco and asked to speak about our brother my england [Music] maybe i should start by talking about the creation the great spirit came down to the earth took dust took it back to sky world [Music] breathed life into the dust of mother earth creating honest nabe spontaneous or original man and then gets money to a lord on a snobby down to meet his mother and so the first steps that he ever took was out of love and honor and respect because the earth was his mother and so it was a great spirit who sent a companion then to travel with on this snobby [Music] it's my again my engine brother wolf was funded in part by john and carolyn peterson charitable foundation bitzer family legacy fund eleanor and thomas wildrick family robert and elky hagie national endowment for the humanities focus fund for wisconsin programming and friends of wisconsin public television i'll be asked again to go so my name is thomas house i'm eagle clan i'm the natural resources manager for the fond du lac band at lake superior chippewa there's only so much of some traditional philosophies that are for public and for recording and the old man that taught me this is from red lake and i said is this okay can i say this much and he said yeah all of creation was being made in pairs so that they could perpetuate themselves they all had partners and so the birds and the deer and and so on and that original man was lonely and so creator kind of took pity on him it's well i'll send someone i've got work for you but i'm going to send someone to keep you company and that was my income and they gave him instructions to walk the earth to name everything to describe everything and myenga didn't know what to think about this and neither did this man and they said well this is what creator wanted during that journey the human he decided to go across this frozen river and when he crossed that frozen river he broke through and he was gonna drown couldn't get out and he asked that mayan gun for help and my england wasn't sure he looked at him he says wow i don't really owe you anything but then he remembered what created told him you guys walked together and so he pulled and helped the man get out of that river and traditional ojibwe philosophy everything is in exchange if people do things for you you owe them if a plant does something for you you owe that plant and so in those times of need when someone helps some people call it asia vision mechanic man decided that he really had a life debt it's a way to look at it with that wolf and from there that's where they continued that walk around creation and really grew close because of that that feeling that you will you saved my life and i forever love you that's the way i understand that part of the story as to why there's such a bond i'm dylan bijakin jennings i am the director of public information here at great lakes indian fish and wildlife commission as well as an elected tribal council official for the bad river band mayangan is a very delicate subject to talk about in our community because my engine is equivalent to our our brother our relative our in our language we talk about india maganidoka all of our relations our relatives and my indian is one of those that we have a really really tight-knit relationship with and our struggle as a national big people is always the same thing to get others to understand what that relationship is and why it is important to us and so here you know you grow up thinking that everybody knows about my indian and how important and sacred my income is and then you meet a lot other people that really could care less and have no idea it's kind of tough to reconcile that i think that's why i've worked so hard my entire life so far to try and educate people in a friendly and compassionate way to kind of reach out the hand and invite people to our community you know invite people to our area to see some of the things that we do to see how we live our lives to see how we acknowledge this relationship of reciprocity that we maintain with everything in creation this one's finished this was sitting in the closet now bonjour and winona my mother and my aunt teresa they were artists and my uncle fred and uncle john were artists my brother was too but he gave it up young you can smell the oil i grew up around it my mother was always painting so i just uh well as a teenager just started you know 14. i was always drawing though cartoons and stuff yeah well there's stories out there my mother told me a couple and not emoji that are my first stories i've jumped a lot of paintings i haven't had a dream in a while but that's where the blue hair came from they were like underwater and they were all blue all the minido spirits that's almost there and they're always the same ones the four winds to get you men to do has always got a lot of hair so this guy is just wrapped in hair in these dreams here i was you know younger doing copying all this greek mythology and you know like digging the satchers and the centroids and all that stuff and especially the saturdays drawing pan and stuff and it gets crossed over that's just amazing it was like it was waiting to come you know and i said well there it is here i was trying to do greek mythology and i could do my own initiative because i got a lot of stories but i don't take so long to do these if i really worked at it i could do three paintings in a year big paintings you know when everything comes together for for all people not just native people we'll see this video here this is certainly one of our best videos this is the only video at the time to where we had all eight members of the pack in the same frame and you can see some of them are off on the right hand side here but one of the unique things is the collared female there was only one part of this whole morning they were outside in front of the camera for four hours that morning and all of her yearling pups and the other adult members of the pack circled in front of the camera but she kept avoiding the camera so we were wondering if she knows it's there she knows something isn't quite right that's one of the exciting parts about doing this is is trying to come up with questions and then trying to figure out how to answer them my name is jeremy st arnold i'm the assistant wildlife and forestry biologist for red cliff our wolf research right now initially is just monitoring we're doing trail camera work we're also doing tracking we're doing road surveys in the winter time and doing some howling surveys in the summer time and we're interested in looking at their pack dynamics their prey selection their habitat selection we're also interested in kill sites and den sites i know that the pack is as big as it's ever been as far as what the dnr knows and since i've been here the origin of the pack as best we know was around 2002 with two wolves and it's kind of gone up and down but right now it is at a peak of 13 wolves with eight adults and there are five pups and we verified those visually we're going out we're gonna set up some cameras and we were looking for the den site and we're tracking this female and we keep getting a good solid ping from her and then it'll disappear and we're assuming she's going down into her den and that's why she's fading in and out and so we're using that in combination with coordinates we've had from the previous month before that when she was setting up the den and getting ready to deliver and finally after four hours we're thinking all right we're just gonna set up some cameras on these trails we're not gonna find the den today we don't wanna you know stress her too much we don't wanna harass her and then all of a sudden ron the wildlife technician for redcliffe he says what's that that's coming out from under the tree and we look and out from under this hemlock tree comes a wolf pup but at first you couldn't tell it just kind of looked like something waddling and once we saw it was a wolf pup first instinct for me which apparently is not normal was to just run and grab the puck we had a plan to eventually get our hands on the pups and we wanted to pit tag them look over their general condition get an idea of how many males and females whether they had any parasites or anything like that i brought it back to ron we were checking it over and then we noticed there's four more pups that came out from under this tree so we ended up catching one male and one female and they're in fantastic condition they didn't have any parasites and ticks no fleas nothing of that nature they they were as clean and healthy as any pup that you're going to find at somebody's house so we were really excited to see that and when we released them we noticed that mom circled back around and we're assuming she reclaimed them because she came so quickly to that area so those myths that you hear about parents wanting to abandon their young they put way too much time and effort and energy and just their life into this to just give up like that but that was certainly the best day we've had so far in any of our wolf activities that one kind of made it all worthwhile our people have a lot of important traditional ecological knowledge that stems from thousands of years of observation within our ancestral homelands today when a scientist comes up with some study and provides empirical data people really have a hard time questioning that because it's science right this traditional ecological knowledge that our people maintain is what scientists call phenology nowadays it's data it's also observation and it's exactly what scientists do as well it just dates back even further than what modern day scientists work with so when you talk about traditional ecological knowledge a scientist goes oh okay yes i know what that is but to us it's anishinaabe jatuan our teachings our way of life there's a coyote in the one deer there's a bear you can see its nose i don't know if anybody wants to peek at it you can see the bear came up and sniffed the camera [Music] yeah he's got his eyeball in it on that one bears really like to come and investigate our cameras and they uh if i accidentally have any scent from the beaver on there they will really sniff at it and they will rub it on themselves i first started setting up trail cameras in june 2014. we initially uh for the first six months had tremendous luck we were getting as many photos as we could possibly want and then as luck would have it as soon as i switched over to the cameras that have video which i was very excited about i thought oh it's gonna be easy we'll get all these wolf videos we had two years where we didn't have wolves show up on camera we knew they were there we saw their sign and they just kept eluding me part of it is when we first started using the cameras that had video they were using white flash and it never occurred to me that white flash was going to be limiting in terms of trying to get wolf footage but it turns out that of all the species out there they have shown the most sensitivity to that white light the coyotes don't seem to shy away from it for very long martin will go right up into the flash deer don't seem to be very phased by it bears aren't phased by it but wolves they kind of just freak out you will not get activity at that camera from wolves but one of the cameras that has a covert ir or a black flash they will show up at that camera so we just were persistent we kept at it and we started getting all kinds of wolf videos we have hours and hours now of not just photos slideshows but videos as well and i've had people come up and express gratitude for the fact that there are the videos on youtube now because now they can share that with people and say hey look at this amazing thing that red cliff has and look at all the wildlife that we have and we have this amazing species that we thought was gone and they're back now we can try to keep them here it's been very positive i've been very impressed with that because nowadays wolves are a very polarizing topic you don't know if you're going to get hatred you don't know if you're going to get the fear and uncertainty from people that don't know much about them or if you're going to get just this blind love and loyalty that comes from the pro wolf side i'm obviously pro-wolfe but i don't want to go too far on that side i have to be scientifically rigorous about things so i still have to go and investigate if they do depredate an animal or if they are harassing a house and i still have to try to help out the human aspect of it too beaver activity there where they chewed off some of the bark and they chewed that tree down wolves when they come into an area that they haven't previously been in before they impact absolutely everything they're apex predators they can help stabilize beaver populations and once beaver populations are stabilized you can get improved river conditions they can change the temperatures of the water make streams better for trout they can allow vegetation to come back to river corridors and once that vegetation comes back you can reduce your sediment loading in your rivers you can increase the number of nesting bird species that come into those areas and also keeps your deer herds healthier it's not just that they're they're at more stable levels for the vegetation but they will take out the old and the weak and the sick and then all of a sudden you have a fit deer population which is obviously a better population to have we're very fortunate to where we as the bad river band have been able to build up our natural resources department and really making it a strong entity for protecting everything that means the world to us creating a baingan plan to help protect my engine to integrate that tek that traditional ecological knowledge into the more technical templates that your typical biologist might utilize it's a very beautiful dialogue when a biologist sits down with one of our ichiyaga our elders and they sit down together and they talk about things because they do they teach each other i thought the idea of a wolf management plan it's going to be loved it's going to be well received the tribe is obviously pro-wolf it never crossed my mind that management was going to be a taboo word but it turns out that some people look at it as you know you're trying to manage your brother or control your brother and that seems like an inappropriate thing that's not a natural thing as opposed to just coexisting with your brother and and trying to be a steward of your brother set them up for success that's all we're really trying to do we're trying to protect their habitat because they can succeed on their own they don't need us for that that's why we ended up settling on wolf protection plan because ideally we wanted to be stewards of the wolf population but we ultimately want to protect it as well the reservation is listed as a wolf sanctuary so it's a place where wolves are not allowed to be trapped they're not allowed to be harmed or harassed so that tribal members and people that visit the reservation can have these opportunities to see these animals and hear these animals and just to know they're there there's something to be said just for knowing they're there and that they're performing their ecological function there's uh there's a value and inherent value in that i just had this idea of the last waterhole there's eleven immunity that i always use those are the ones i've always seen in dreams so i figured out who they were because usually the winds are blowing air like viticellis yeah they're not people they're spirits except for he's half now beaujo that's his grandmother and nicole that's the north wind that's the south wind that's the west wind that's his dad one day she was picking berries in the field and sun gusta wind that was it conception of man of ocean yeah anyway they're sitting around this water hole it's the last water hole and they're creating a new earth i'll make the grid on here bigger that takes a while for it to scale out and then i'll just transfer what we always tell our children is that our stories are so important because they teach us how to be you can listen to a story like how this place was created you can listen to a story about my ingame and if you listen to it one time you might get something out of that you might learn something about yourself but you go and you listen to it again and you pick up something completely different that you would never have thought of before and that's how our way of life is we don't just sit down and read a book and then know all of our stories and what to draw out of them we spend our life learning about these things [Music] we try to speak to our daughter in the language as much as possible she loves stories almost 1 years old now but she loves loves just listening to stories so that's how we're gonna battle some of the things that our people are up against these days it's our stories our teachings our way of life that are gonna save our children as they become rooted in their identity and know who they are that's what's going to help us [Applause] my english name is wanda mcfagan i come from the mcgeezy clan the eagle clan sand lake community is my home within the saint croix reservation i'd like to tell a story about the wolf meegan and how he came to be with us here on earth when the creator first formed the land here the last one that he lowered down to the earth was anishinabe original man anishinaabe asked the creator why did he put him here alone so then after the creator thought about it the creator gave him a companion and that companion was a wolf magen when they had walked here together they became very close like brothers and we still consider me hagen to be our brother today after their journey was done the creator had told them that they have to go to separate paths but they would always stay close he told them what will happen to one will also happen to the other that was true because if you look back in our history we lost a lot of our land we lost a lot of our way to the point where we were almost became extinct assimilated and if you look back on megan's history you can see the same any time that i see niegan i put tobacco down out of respect we have to take care of him because if he vanishes who knows we may vanish too and his face does he look big maybe his forehead huh right here bring it down a touch these are all the amenities i use every time someone said how can we put more women in i said well there's nokumas and winona and then two of the winds i can't make all the winds women [Laughter] i in this one i made the eyes of the dead woman usually that was a man it doesn't matter either the dead that's just the past it's always there it's always present that's just the eyes of all the native indigenous people who died in the taking of this country it's a reminder nukumus that means grandmother very wisely woman basically just all our oral traditions go back with her being the grandmother and bringing up natabuja up here they say win abujo it's not about me or anybody else this will be here for the youth you know of tomorrow the eighth generation and now and the ancestors that's what all my work's for that's it it's for the present the past and the future which all exists now anyway right we don't have a past and future without the present it's all here right so here we have the cacogans loose pack we've got the little girls point morrison creek pack west fire lane pack and then the potato river pack now the purple line is the boundaries of the bad river reservation and then the red line is this proposed six mile buffer in our wolf plan i'm lacey hill castern i am the wildlife program manager for the bed river tribe i started working for the tribe back in 2010 so i've been here for seven years now and basically i oversee the entire wildlife program for the reservation and part of that is wolf monitoring so we actually started monitoring for wolves trapping and radio collaring wolves back in 1996 so the tribe's been doing that work for 21 years now we want to protect the wolves on the reservation but we also want to look at neighboring landowners and like other agencies as well because the wolves they don't know political boundaries so they're coming on and off reservation and we can put whatever we want and for protection for them on reservation but we have four packs of wolves and they go on and off reservations so our protections aren't good enough to protect those tribal wolf packs so we really want to work with the wisconsin department of natural resources and also neighboring landowners too and just like how do they feel about wolves and kind of explain to them why it's important to protect at least these tribal wolves mayangan is very important to the ojibwe culture and is seen as a brother the creator told them that they needed to walk in separate paths but what happened to one would happen to the other so that's really important for a lot of the ojibwe people that story in my engine that's something that we try to raise all of our children around and our communities to understand those relationships the relationship of reciprocity with everything in creation and especially those things that have walked that path with us my indian is one of those beings that has always been there by our side and has also been there to watch out for us much like it's our responsibility today to watch out for for him as well because our lives parallel each other in our tribal communities we have leadership that is tasked with the responsibility of taking care of our people and watching out for our people buying it in their communities you know they they do the same as we would do in our tribal community you know watching out for one another taking care of each other feeding each other very similar things that i don't think a lot of people think about as much so this is a regular vhf collar so this is typically what we use to collar wolves this is what's been used for collaring wolves for many years this will go on the animal this vhf portion will hang on the bottom and this is what emits the radio signal we work closely with the wisconsin department of natural resources for radio tracking efforts this is the time of year that we typically trap a lot of the traps we actually set right on the roads because we have a lot of back roads on the reservation and the wolves use the roads a lot as travel corridors we use foothold traps and they're designed just to grab the wolf by the toes between the foot pad and the toe pads so it doesn't injure the wolf once the wolf steps in that trap it'll grab between those pads and then it's on a drag system so the wolf can actually pull the trap and run into a more wooded area and then it's got a grapple hook on a chain that'll tangle around to tree your vegetation and hold the wolf there until we get there wolves are pretty docile in the trap they'll usually just be laying there we use a ketamine xylazine mixture to mobilize and then we'll put the radio collar on them and then give them a reversal drug and then just let them wake up and continue to monitor them and make sure everything's okay i've got some smelly products underneath that rock that when a wolf is traveling these roads at night and smell that in order for them to really get to what they're smelling they're going to have to come up to this rock here and place a foot ideally right here is where they're going to place a foot to brace themself and then reach and move the rock or nuzzle the rock their nose and ideally that's where their foot's gonna be is where the trap is set right now and then they'll be caught if a wolf comes in here and works a set you can see its tracks really well and uh so that's something we're looking for and then also uh if you're unfortunate enough um the wolves will taunt you sometimes and they will literally come up and turn around and they'll drop a scat right on the trap bed they came in they smelled your bait or their lure they weren't impressed and they left you their calling card i guess we do have lone wolves on the reservation they kind of skirt the boundaries between the packs go further in another packs home range but they usually don't stay there for too long we had one collared wolf that we collared back in 2010 my first year working here and he had dispersed after about two months of me being here and he actually started a new pack down in the rice lake area so it was really interesting because of the radio collars we're actually able to see where some of these individuals are going one of my wolves we had collared this individual down here and that's why there's a lot of points in that area because i was getting locations every three hours after the collaring had occurred and then this blue area actually covers 180 square miles which average home range is like 40 to 80 square miles and he was covering 180 it was just insane but then he ended up joining the potato river pack but late winter around february is when they're breeding he would take a hike down to the mercer area so he'd be down there for a couple weeks and he'd come back to the potato river pack area which was fascinating and then i'll i'll just work on this little section right here that's where i was oh maxwell paris would use ink on his and there's no problem with this i can just go around it i don't have to go over it or anything and when i when i glaze it i can just glaze around it with a transparent glaze the technique is really old leonardo used it and maxwell paris used it it's seeing the light through one color going through another color and it just changes it into a nice mix it's actually using light to mix on this one i'm going to use two glazes i think two grounds i'm going to use a blue for the skin and then the rest i'm going to use uh like a naples jello and a burnt sienna find a medium in there a nice color a nice view i mean okay i'm done with that i i i i'm gonna go up here it's shadowy up here these are all men do i just put them in human form the four winds are right there and then we'll just move that's his light for the night and the only reason i figured out he's the moon is he had a tattoo of a moon on his face i think it's just a passion now it's not i mean about what other people think i would do it anyway all right one two three [Music] i'm working on planning a big educational event for wolf awareness week in october we have a program through a natural resources department that once a month we try to have these different activities to get youth more involved in the natural resources so far i've done the vhf tracking with them and we've done some winter tracking and i'd really like to get some kids out and do some wolf howling so anywhere from three to 11 wolves so is it there um i've been asked to come in and tell everybody a little bit about my engine now we know she's been saying wolf wolf wolf in our language the the word for it is my engine can everybody say that right on there's a story about my engine and the story has to do with a person his name was anishinabe and he asked the creator the creator of all living things can i have somebody to walk with you and so the creator sent me and my engine and anishinaabe walked together for the longest time but there came a time when they had to part their ways they came to a fork in the road that they had to leave each other's but my indian said i will always be there for you and anishinaabe said i'll always be there for you too and whatever happens to you will happen to me so we always look at my engine and we remember that time that we walked behind and we take care of my name because we remember what happens to my incan will happen to us you know i wanted to be a wildlife biologist ever since i was a little girl so actually being it now and getting to go out and study wolves and study eagles it's awesome it was really fascinating when i was working on the wolf planet and seeing that wow in 1996 we already had three packs on the reservation that's amazing so because i think in the state of wisconsin in 1996 the population was only around 300 and now we're at around 925 and even 21 years ago we already have those three packs established on reservation despite what's out there in popular culture and books you see a lot of my engine being portrayed as you know the little red riding hood wolf and the you see a lot of movies about werewolves and other other things that really do spook people and freak people out but we were always taught not to be afraid of that that when they presented themselves to us to be seen that it was a blessing it was a gift you put down your tobacco that those ones were part of our way of life part of a very very important part of creation and that it was a gift to have an encounter with my engine i see gentleness i don't see this red riding hood version and i'm not sure why stories like that came about we don't read those kind of stories because they just give a bad light on our relative they make him seem like he's don't leave your child outside because he'll come and snatch him or something you know they they make him out to be something that i don't believe he is they're beautiful just their whole characteristic and how they care for their babies they're very protective of their babies they don't want nobody to hurt them but they won't hurt some of us around their babies because there's that trust and i believe somewhere in the back of me against mind all through their ancestry i think they remember how they walked with us [Music] so when i see one i put tobacco down i've taken my grandson to zoos and we see them back and forth back and forth and that's hurtful because they shouldn't be there like that they weren't meant to be there like that [Music] and so the great spirit gets money they told both anisnabe and my england in many ways the two of you are alike when you take a mate it will be for life both of you will be excellent hunters and then get money to also spoke of prophecy telling of a time when others may come among you both of you will be hunted for your hair my hand and pores hide anatomy for its scalp the great spirit told both anas naba and mahingan of seven prophecies and so today we've entered into the age of the seventh fire needs watchful issue day one when human beings encroach upon malingan's territory mangan retreats further and further into the wilderness and so that time may come when there will be no wilderness if that time comes you mind you'll pass out of existence become extinct and so you honest nabe if your brother mangan passes out of existence you'll soon follow you will die of great loneliness of spirit so now we're waiting to see clusters from the satellite collar and if we see a number of them in one tight area in a short period of time we know that it's most likely either they have a kill there or they have a dental rendezvous site there and these rendezvous sites are where they like to bring the pups when they're done with the den once the pups are mobile and they refuse to stay in the den and they're starting to eat meat and uh and roam around and so often at these rendezvous sites you can find bones that are chewed up with little puppy teeth marks on them i've heard of people finding traffic cones plastic bottles anything a puppy would chew on at home a wolf pup is not above chewing on it as well and there's generally going to be one member of the pack that's kind of acting as a nanny there and that could be male female an older wolf a younger wolf they seem to take turns doing it i think that's why historically the tribes looked at them as being the brother of native americans because there's just so many things about them that are similar i mean we always say that it takes a village to raise children and with a wolf pack they absolutely use that principle that every single member of the pack takes some kind of role in raising those pups whether it's just leading them on a hunt being a nanny for a little bit bringing back food and the way that they try to keep track of each other they always want to know where each other are so there's almost unlimited numbers of parallels between humans and wolves if you're really willing to look for them and be honest about it marvin default lived in the woods my family so i've had many encounters with the mind but i met face to face with my gun one time we must both hit that trail at the same time and about from me to you and we bought this looked in each other's eyes for about five seconds you know and he took off one way i took off another way you know i think it startled both of us she's actually closer than i thought i'd say she's probably no more than half a mile away from us right now we've definitely cut down some of the distance we are closer and it sounds like she's just off of this trail my guess is that if we start walking up this trail she's going to try to circle around us and try to get a good idea of what we are and then she will probably move off a little further but there's a chance we can find some tracks up here and try to get a pack count potentially she's been hanging out in this general area so there's either a food source nearby or there's a chance she's looking for a new den because we would expect her to be having pups within the next couple of weeks or so she already started to circle us she's crossed over for this side of the trail though for sure what we see is we have a number of individuals that have come together after fanning out and once they hit this deeper snow they converge into a single file line which is very typical of wolves and they're trying to take the path of least resistance so that the one on the front breaking trail is the one expending the most energy and the rest of them can just fall in line and you'll see this the deeper the snow gets the more you'll see this type of behavior where they they want to go single file and then once the snow is gone or it's melting they'll be more likely to fan out and they'll cover more distance but we can see we have one two three four five six seven such a tracks converging on this first path and then we have one two three four converging on this you can see my hand fits right inside there then i remember one time i had a dog we called them blizzard next to our house every night mine gonna holler over there so i watched that dog one time going over there so i got down my hands and knees i followed that dog over to that pack of wolves and come right in there didn't fight or didn't holler or just watching they're just living yeah so when you live in the woods or you live amongst them i've had nothing to be afraid of you know i've never had a bad experience you know with the mind and all my encounters even seeing a little litter of their pups watching them as we were following a set of tracks there was about one and a half to two feet of snow and we saw one area that didn't have any snow in it and then we saw a head poke up and that's how we knew right away that we'd found the den then it was a mad scramble to try to catch all the little guys because they all went different directions ron you go that way you grab these guys i'll grab these guys all right we got them corralled those two escaped again so when we were trying to make sure that they were staying warm whenever we had one that we were done checking over around to take it and put it in his coat and so at the end he's got six pups in his coat and they're crawling up his back can't exactly get him out of there very easily but at the same time it's a pretty fun problem to have this is another aspect of the dreams that i kept was the blue hair i couldn't really make out any detail i could see here though [Music] it just it just looked like they were in a lot of wind so i tried to figure out a way to do that and that's that's where i started using hair as wind and buck skin for direction that came after i stopped using reference i stopped copying things so it was like a four-year transition into accepting what i could do on my own and then the dream started [Music] at first it was just like a regular dream and i didn't know what the heck it was but then when i started repeating it was kind of strange apparently i wake up in my sleep and draw it's a scribble i have a few of those i don't know where there are right now but the style lends itself to doing anything like just me making something up like this was the idea of the last waterhole you know there's no more so they're creating a new world out of this so so it's like a combination of the earth hunters creation of a new world you know that's all going into this i'm taking you know people from the traditions and putting it into something new i think being traditional if you don't add anything to it it's just gonna die so you know i bring new things in i don't know people don't have to like it it doesn't matter and so in those prophecies the great spirit said that in the age of the seventh fire that a new people would arise the new people would turn and look back they would retrace their footsteps that would take them back to ancient times and ancient knowledge they'd pick up the sacred bundles that have fallen by the wayside to get the teachings and the meanings of these bundles i'd go to certain elders who had taken them underground for generations because of persecution so they say that uh honest nabe we're given a very special gift we refer to it as much loosely interpreted in our language it means medicine along with that medicine goes a responsibility and that responsibility is to go out and educate others as to how to live in harmony and balance with the natural world many of our elders will talk about that about how we really had to put things our way of life our ceremonies everything underground and hold it close because it was really being forcefully ripped from us and it's not like that anymore but it's a it's a long long journey to bring that stuff back it takes a lot it takes a lot to rebuild your your language infrastructure it takes a lot to bring our ceremonies back it takes a lot a lot of time a lot of sacrifices and now we see my indian and the population has been doing pretty well making its way back but now different entities want to put an end to that and stop some of that thriving and that's that's a scary thought to us because as our communities start to do better as we bring back our way of life and bring it back strong as we can you know we think about that too you know what's going to happen to my incan even though i grew up in between two reservations and i'm native american myself i wasn't raised with any of the traditions or any of the stories i wasn't raised hearing about how important wolves were and the spiritual connection i wasn't raised learning anything about the clans or anything like that and since i've started working for redcliffe we've come to learn a lot about that some of it i've learned on my own some of it with ron we've attended events we've talked to some elders tried to learn the language a little bit more so we can understand a little bit of that aspect of it we try to lay down tobacco and an animal has to be harmed or when we find one that met a bad time i think we've learned from each other we've learned from the tribe and i've certainly learned a lot from the animals we've been humbled by them more times than we can probably count yeah they made us realize that no matter what we read those animals are not going to ever be put into some little box there's no black and white there's a lot of gray area with animals they don't care what the literature says so i'll give in some thought to that story of the mayan gun it just comes up with a word that i think of is the anishinaabe is it when it's a gay one it's it's that you don't just talk about read about something you live it you practice and along with that practice is you show respect every living thing there is on this earth and when you make your moccasin tracks so be careful so that when you look back you can say you left some good tracks so that seven generations ahead they too can make their moccasin tracks but that story the anishinabe and the mayan gun if you know the story and you follow the teaching that mangan's my brother my own flesh and blood my brother that's my brother i love him as a family and that is the the essence of the feeling of a shana bay we talk about that mind and that's my brother that's my brother there that's good i'll put it high just in case i pulled it and i'm going to put ojibwe over there rabbit in ojibwe ojibwe because i'm part of something bigger than me i've always done that since i was 15. so i just want to make the points and i'm just apart i'm not it i didn't dream this it's just a creation i have no idea why i did this a collective consciousness yeah the idea of the last water hole they're creating a new world there that's the turtle maybe it's kind of like up in what's in the news but i beat it out and this is the last water hole well it's left as a spirit [Music] no people and so we're living in very historic times now and has predicted that uh in the age of the seventh player that all humankind would come to a fork in the road and would be confronted with a choice [Music] it was said that one pork and a road would be a hard surface and the other fork in the road would be a more natural path today we see that hard surface that pollutes and destroys and upsets the natural balance mother earth the plants the animals the water the air in this eleventh hour of a very serious environmental crisis we say gawin and that means no it's not going to happen we will win this battle big what's mayo uh-huh [Music] so [Music] my engine brother wolf was funded in part by john and carolyn peterson charitable foundation bitzer family legacy fund eleanor and thomas wildrick family robert and elky hege national endowment for the humanities focus fund for wisconsin programming and friends of wisconsin public television

Channel: Ann Frances

Views: 242

Rating: 4.6923075 out of 5

Keywords: Gray Wolf, Ojibwe tribe, Red Cliff reservation, Rabbett Strickland, Wisconsin, Ma'iingan, Nanabozhoo, Ma'iingin

Id: heDBCpl8nzk

Length: 56min 18sec (3378 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021