Ojibwe Dialect and Culture Differences

today i'd like to share a little bit about how the ojibwe diversified into the many different language dialects and cultural variances that we have today the ojibwe have a long long history our dna is truly ancient the archaeologists haven't yet told us how long the ojibwe ancestors have been here but we do know that all cultures change over time and the ojibwe emerged as a distinct group of people separate from the other member tribes of the algonquian language family a lot more recently than some people might think although our dna is probably tens of thousands of years old on this continent at the same time the emergence of the ojibwe probably only happened about 2 000 years ago before that our ancestors were still living here but we're part of a larger group sometimes called algonquian or proto-algonquian and today there are 29 different tribes in that language family humans moved around a lot about 11 000 years ago the last big glaciers retreated from the end of the last major ice age and when that happened there were huge changes to the climate on planet earth and to the movement of human populations and the ancestors of the proto-algonquian group ended up living along the east coast and in the eastern great lakes this was a land that was really abundant in food foraging hunting small game big game well suited for indigenous agriculture especially the farming of corn beans and squash there was abundant fish in the oceans and in the inland lakes and as a result there was a huge population boom and then as the area became more densely populated once in a while there was a cyclical drought that would stress feeding that many people who were living in the same area and when you had that many people living in close proximity to one another once in a while something would happen and people would start fighting so these are some of the practical reasons that may have encouraged the ojibwe to spread out and move from original homes in the east coast westward at the same time there are a number of spiritual reasons for this too the ojibwe tell stories about prophets who appeared among the people foretold of the coming of a new group of humans that intended to do them harm in a time of great suffering and among the things the prophet said was that people were to move west to the land where food grows on water and usually we've understood this to mean a reference to the wild rice it wasn't as simple then once the prophets appeared and delivered this message that everybody would just pack up their bags and start moving the ojibwe actually over a period of many hundreds of years slowly started migrating west at this point in time the great lakes was already inhabited by many other people so there's no way to just pack up your bags and you know move from you know new york to minnesota because there were so many other people who were already living there so the movements and migrations happened slowly um there was often diplomacy with other people who were living there once in a while there was conflict and this was a long process and not everybody left and certainly not at the same time so as people started moving especially through the great lakes and forming new population centers this happened over a period of hundreds of years imagine the whole history of the united states is just 250 years it's not really very long at all and so the ojibwe had been moving even longer than that as it happened there were a number of cultural dynamics that really impacted us as well deeply embedded in ojibwe culture was the belief that the great spirit had a plan for everybody and we'd catch glimpses of that plan when we went fasting or had a dream and so if someone for example had a dream that they were to have a sweat lodge and the door was to open to the east and certain colors yellow would represent the east for example well then that's what they do and if their person living in the next wigwam had a dream that they were to have a sweat lodge but the door was to open to the south and things were to begin in the south and that you know the color for that cardinal direction was red well then that's what they did and both were considered right in a cultural sense because they were informed directly through dreams or visions when fasting and so forth and as a result you got two kind of contradictory threads in ojibwe culture one is that people tended to be really tolerant of any kind of cultural difference if someone is doing their you know first kill feast a little differently over there people would say oh well that's what they do over there this is what we do here and so people were really tolerant of that kind of cultural difference at the same time ojibwe people tended to be completely intolerant of being told what to do people had their own sources of knowledge and empowerment and really could not abide someone from outside of their immediate group telling them how things were and the ojibwe like a lot of indigenous groups and unlike a lot of uh the cultures that people know a lot about in western europe for example did not have big institutions like a catholic church or something like that that said here's how you worship god and here's what you say when you do it in the ojibwe world that was unheard of and in fact even civil chiefs who might be you know endowed with a certain authority to lead by you know their clan um and birthright and things like that ojibwe chiefs did not command people what to do they had some influence they had a position but if anyone didn't like what their chief was saying or doing if or even if they just got too much influence more often than not someone was packing up their bags moving down the river and starting a new village and saying that person is not my chief anymore and so this further exacerbated the expectation of not being bossed around so even during periods of conflict like when there was war going on no one could simply say all the young men in the village get your weapons were going over here they would look at somebody like that and laugh or ignore them or let them run off to war all alone so to lead an ojibwe country was really really difficult when somebody wanted to put a war party together they had to go around with tobacco have numerous conversations often had to put together supplies moccasins for all of the warriors um you know birchbark canoes things like that food supplies and if someone couldn't muster that people were not super likely to accompany them once in a while there was someone who had you know great reputation or there was a time of great crisis when a village was being attacked or there was an imminent threat when people would rally a little bit more but it was never by somebody saying you know everybody follow me or you know whoever doesn't follow me you're going to whatever pay taxes or be punished somehow in fact there's even an interesting uh section in robert cole's book and he's talking about his experience amongst the lake superior ojibwe traders come and give gifts to the chief the chief ended up piling everything up in a pile in the center of the village and told his people help yourselves and then told his people look i am more impoverished than any of you and i commend myself to your charity and that was the ojibwe way chiefs it was disdained uh for somebody for in a position of leadership to acquire and exhibit greater wealth or to try to boss people around so this is one of the dimensions of ojibwe culture that was influenced in part by our migration the freedom people had to move from one place to another and also these deep-seated cultural beliefs and so forth as the ojibwe spread out over a long period of time we also occupied many different types of terrain so for example if you look at you know bear island ontario which is right on the quebec border and turtle mountain north dakota believe it or not wild rice does not grow in either place but those communities are very much ojibwe communities however in between those communities in most of you know michigan wisconsin minnesota northwestern ontario manitoba wild rice is considered a staple food ojibwe soul food it is a defining feature of who we are people of the wild rice so that just gives you a little sense of the geographic dispersal and big variances that happened in cultural practice and even the kinds of food that we ate as ojibwe people moved west and into the plains even in the tall grass prairie region we hunted buffalo and it was a staple food uh we traveled with acquired horses and traveled on horseback in the 1800s but throughout the great lakes most people primarily traveled on the waterways and water was the highway that people used to get from one place to another so all of this this topographical difference also fueled big cultural differences so when you look at a place like turtle mountain they have a thirsting dance dance which is very much like um the sundance of many plains tribes and that is unknown and in some ojibwe communities even taboo in parts of the great lakes but at turtle mountain and many of the communities in montana it's a central piece of the cultural practice there so that gives you a little sense of another dimension that fueled cultural variation amongst the ojibwe in addition to that the ojibwe had a long history of interaction with europeans the french first arrive in the great lakes in the 1640s and when they do they bring jesuit priests and they are busy trying to convert natives to christianity the french unlike the british also encouraged their fur traders to marry indigenous women and cement trade relationships with family relationships even today about a third of ojibwe people have french surnames from the long-standing intermarriage with europeans and this custom continued for a very long time started in the 1640s and the french are doing this for well over a hundred years before you get into the french and indian war and eventually they pull their army out but they still left all their people behind french-speaking quebecois and canada and so forth and so the british ended up hiring the same people to run their trade networks 25 years after the british takeover in the great lakes you get the american revolution and the american fur company hires the same people french surnames people who speak french english and ojibwe are running the american fur trade so this long-standing custom of inner marriage especially with the french has big impacts as well the french had their own cultural expectations so if you get like a french fur trader who marries an ojibwe woman they have a bunch of babies the french fur trader might insist that the boys that they produced would be sent to europe for a formal education and then brought back to new france and put to work as fur traders using their knowledge of french english and ojibwe acquired through their formal education and their lived experience um you know to work the trade networks but these people might look browner than me but they were catholic they didn't identify themselves strictly as indigenous although they would speak to their indigenous roots as it served their purposes the same french fur traders that did this with their boys would use their girls to force arranged marriages to further cement trade networks and um and so forth and so there's a lot of kind of french patriarchy that ends up influencing this dynamic after well over 100 years of this not only do you have a large group of people who are of mixed racial ancestry but you simply have a lot of catholic people with indigenous ancestry and so especially when you're looking in the eastern part of ojibwe country and ottawa country and so forth you will have a lot of catholics and as a result some of the other indigenous cultural practices start to deteriorate and this is long before you get into the residential boarding school policies of canada and the united states that further do damage to our our cultural practices and language fluency rates and so it was pretty interesting to me but in the severn region what we sometimes call og cree communities in northern ontario sometimes you need a float plane or you take a truck across an ice road in the wintertime to get in there they're pretty isolated and in some of those communities the fluency rate is a hundred percent the population of fluent speakers grows as the population grows but in some of those communities even though the language fluency might be high in part because of their geographic isolation people might be almost entirely christian and some of the cultural practices that seem common in maybe minnesota would be almost unknown in those places for example i was talking to tom beardy who was a great speaker from bearskin lake and a teacher at lakehead university and he had written on the board you know a simple phrase in ojibwe a way named right and to me away named gado daim that means who is your clan right and the clan is a really important part of ojibwe culture in my area and you know i offered that and he said clan what's clan that means who is your friend so for him not only had the usage of the word dodem changed instead of meaning clan it meant friend for him as a fluent speaker but the concept of clan was entirely foreign to him so that's another indicator of the kind of cultural variations that you might see and so as you look across ojibwe country there's no such thing as the ojibwe culture there are many ojibwe cultures they vary quite a bit by topography by place by you know the intermarriage experiences missionary experiences rates at which people were brought out of their communities and sent to residential boarding schools and so forth when you look at today i think it's unfortunate that a lot of indigenous people sometimes engage in a little oppression olympics or try to out indian one another and prove who's more authentic or something like that i think ultimately all of that just um hurts us and discourages people from participating in our culture and communities there's a non-indigenous thinker whose name is paulo freieri and he wrote a book called pedagogy of the oppressed and in there he says that when you take any oppressed group when they have an experience with oppression that ultimately they internalize and house you know that oppression inside of themselves so he might use an example like the puritans you know going across the ocean to get away from their oppressor and was that the end of oppression hardly what happened is it was carried inside of them so it showed up in four ways so one is it was internalized oppression blame shame and so forth being mean to their own people otherwise known as lateral oppression and so that was like salem witch trials and things like that and then the third way was intra-oppressed group oppression so the puritans start beating up on natives and they start beating up on black people and the oppression dynamic keeps going of the four pillars he said props up oppression only one is an external group trying to keep somebody down the other three happen inside of that community so something that complicates ojibwe cultural dynamics today is that on the one hand while we have this cultural ancient cultural thread of you know being very tolerant of cultural diversity but being really intolerant of being told what to do and that uh that that is an ancient practice custom and belief at the same time we are also deeply impacted by our experiences with oppression and so you might see internalized oppression that could be low self-esteem higher suicide rates things like that you will see lateral oppression that's the crabs in the bucket one starts crawling out someone else is grabbing their legs and pulling them back down it's being mean to our own people and another dynamic is within the indigenous community you might see you know anti-black you know you might see sexism you might see homophobia and things like that and all of these things prop up the racial caste system that keeps indigenous people oppressed so as indigenous people i think it's important to be aware of where some of our cultural diversity within the ojibwe context comes from our differences in harvest practices cultural beliefs dialects and so forth as experienced through our historical experience and then also to separate from that the way that our experience with oppression in history has sometimes left us with unhealthy habits that make it harder to be the best versions of ourselves as individuals and as communities as we unpack all of this it's easier to focus on how can i decolonize all of this experience how can i re-indigenize my thinking my ways of being and interacting with the rest of the world so that we can be healthier individuals and live in healthier communities thanks for watching today i'm anton troyer let's keep in touch i'm active on social media and my website has lots of information on my books speaking engagements free ojibwe language resources resources for teachers and more migraines

Channel: Anton Treuer

Views: 1,049

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: #Ojibwe #Oji-Cree #French #NewFrance #Ojibwemigration

Id: 009r3Ra4iEA

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021