- [speaking Ojibwemowin
to Gitchie Manitou] When I do that, then I call in
all them spirits from the air,
from the stars, from the day and the night, the light and dark. All these things
that Creator has created for all these human beings here. When they know
I'm going to do this, then they wait for the command. I go to waabanong, and I say, panesi miigwech. Then I go to zhaawanong,
the south. Zhawendaagozi for new life. Say miigwech. Then I take it over
to the west, ningaabii. Ningaabii'anong for the life
after we live here on Earth. Miigwech for the ancestors. I take it to the north
and say miigwech giiwedin, Anamikaw for our medicine
and our health here on Earth. Aho.
Miigwech. I offer this asemaa,
this bawaagan, to Omaamaa aki who gives us
our life and our living here on Earth. Miigwech Omaamaa aki. I point it up to the moon
for my grandmother, Nookomis. I thank her for bringing
Anishinaabe here to Earth and bringing our life
here on Earth to do our job here
for my grandmother, Nookomis. Say miigwech
to the moon and the stars. With that, I light this pipe
for all these directions. - Mole Lake History was funded in part by: Irene Daniell Kress, Francis A. and Georgia F. Ariens
Fund of the Community Foundation
for the Fox Valley Region, Evjue Foundation, Ron and Patty Anderson, Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin
Wisconsin Idea Endowment, Timothy William Trout
Education Fund, National Endowment
for the Humanities, and Friends of
Wisconsin Public Television. - [Speaking Ojibwemowin] My name is Fred Ackley. That's my English name. My Anishinaabe anjinikaazh
is Makoons. That means little bear
or cub bear. It was given to me by
my grandfather, Charles Ackley. His Indian name, anjinikaazh,
was Azaadi. It means popple tree. He was a member
of Midewiwin Society for the Anishinaabe people. He was a powerful gozaakiid,
or shaman. I lit the sage before and I'm going to light
this sweetgrass for us. What the sage does is-- We believe that it politely asks
the negative energy to leave for a little while
so we can talk a little bit and not to come and mess
with our hearts and our minds. So when we leave here, maybe we
can have one kind of thought of what happened here today. With this little bit
of sweetgrass, though, it goes for everything on Earth. It represents what
we just talked about. It's our sacrifice
to the Creator today for what we're doing. And I thank Him for giving us
these things today. With that, I'll go to somewhat
of our history for the people here I'm talking about. Where we're sitting at right
here today is what they call
"Rice Lake" in English. It's Manoomin zaaga'igan,
or the rice lake, that's what our people call it
in Ojibwemowin, the language. This lake here's
been feeding Native people for thousands of years. It was carbon dated back
in the late '70s and '80s from the rice they took off
the stalk that year from the DNR and the UW people as 2,000 years old. So down here,
if you look down below, it's maybe 100, 90 feet down
in that muck out there. It's packed
with wild rice seeds, and they come up every year,
one at a time, and they stay down there
for I don't know how long. And that's why
this comes back every year. Now, the reason
why we live here on this lake is because in the old days Indian people
didn't have a lot of food, so we had to live off the land and whenever the lake
would give up the food, we'd come here
and pick this rice and then parch it and prepare it for winter
and eat it all year round. So this is why we live here now and why we came here
later on in our history. Through the known history
since the European people had came in settlement here, we've been living in
an area called Madeline Island up on Lake Superior. We started our journey,
they say, from the east coast all the way
down the St. Lawrence, the different stops through time
until they got to the place where food grows on the water. And that's right here.
This lake. This is where the food grows
on the water, the manoomin. So, through that time frame,
years of travel and migration, we finally end up back here
in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Madeline Island. People lived there on Madeline
Island for a long, long time, under one chief and a
government, an old ancient Indian
government, the Anishinaabe. And it got time where the island
was getting too crowded. So the medicine men,
the gozaakiid men, they looked
to the spirit world and they asked
what the Indians should do. And what it came to the Indian
people through the gozaakii that they would move off
the island into the inland where there were places
where there was more bountiful food for the Indians
to eat and live. What we felt
was taking our homeland back, we were just taking back where years ago
when there was a great war that the Indian people
had amongst ourselves. We were forced as refugees
to the east coast, and then now we're back here. We were told to come back here. So all these thousand, maybe
a thousand, 1,500 years, we lived in peace and harmony with the people
on Madeline Island. Until one chief was born and he was a great chief, great war chief
and a leader for the Ojibwe. He had a daughter
he loved a lot, and a great love and respect
other people had for that woman, his daughter, because she was
the daughter of the chief. Well, she got married and she married
a member of the Marten Clan, the waabizheshi. And he was one of the war
chiefs, a general I guess, commander. He was a great warrior. Well, his daughter
and his son-in-law, they had a set of twins. Twin boys. They were the first born, so they were going to be
the next in line to the throne
for the chieftainship. In them days, the law said that Indian people, only one of them twins
could live. The other one
had to be taken at birth. And the chief,
he loved his daughter so much and he seen the baby twins,
in his heart he couldn't. He couldn't come
to keeping the law. So he had the Marten son-in-law
take one of the babies down here to the interior, and our journey came this way
to live down here. He kept the other son
up on Bad River, up by Madeline Island
and Red Cliff. And his name was Waubojeeg. And the son that came down here
by Mole Lake, Sokaogoning, his name was Waabizheshi. A white fisher
looks like a marten. That's how they got their names,
the twin boys. Six miles southeast
from right here, this lake here, was the lake over there
called "Post Lake" in English. Here, the tribe here
that we call ourselves, our name, is Sokaogoning,
or Post Lake People, or People of
the Post in the Lake. At the time
with the narrows over there, there's a widening
of the Wolf River and it causes this lake
to be formed. But in the middle of that lake
when it was formed thousands, whatever, when the ice left or
whatever happened, they left
a petrified tree there, a post. Now, on top of that post,
whatever happened, when the sun would be like at
a certain time on a certain day, our people would gather there
for Midewiwin ceremonies. We'd have feast and prayers and we'd wait for that post, for that light
to shine off that post. That was supposed to be
for healing, good luck, for the future, that God was still blessing
the Indian people. He was showing us that
by building all our mounds he received our prayers
and our thoughts. So we prayed there
all the time. I come from the Mundua. They were the ancient
Anishinaabe people way back, where people now days wonder who built these mounds
and why. When we built those mounds, our people had a smile
on their face every day. We were all happy. Somebody would be fishing. Somebody would be hunting deer. And somebody would be over there
working on dirt, digging up dirt, carrying dirt. Everybody would be working. And there would be a few people
laying there sleeping all day. Strange people would walk
into the village and say, "I see everybody working here. "How come those people aren't? "They get to sleep every day. "They don't do nothing. "You feed them, you help them out every day."
You know? And the Indians said, "Well,
when we're doing all this during the day, those people are up all night telling us what to do
the next day." See, and that's where
the observation and sharing, the night and day
with the Indian people. They call them people
waabanos. They watch the morning star. They knew exactly
what time of the year things were going
to change and move. They even knew
what time of the year we were
in the whole vast universe spinning way out
for thousands of years until we got back over here. All these different things
they're finding out now we knew about. Why? Because we didn't forget. Today, this is the memory
that's coming back. Down south of here,
war came to the Indian people. These women were
harvesting the rice and these Lakota warriors
were coming around looking for scalps. And they see the women
and children with the rice, so they took their scalps,
killed women and children, and had a scalp dance
on the women and children. So when the news
got all the way up here and all around the warriors, we all got a big party
and we went and got them. So then my understanding was
down by Mystic Lake over there, that Lakota tribe came back up
here with more warriors and they were going
to take us back because these guys went home
and they lied about that. They said, "No, we didn't kill
no women and children." They said,
"We just attacked them." They lied. So all these guys come up here
on a lie. And that's where they died here
on the lie. Five hundred guys died here. All my warriors
got out these holes and waited for them
to get in here, and once they got here,
they're all dead. They didn't go nowhere. We had this whole lake with
foxholes around this whole lake. It was a lot bigger then,
but you can still see them all the way through here
on the shoreline. We call foxholes, but we dug,
pulled the weeds over like that. They'd never know
you were there. When they got here, they never seen their families
down in Mystic Lake no more. We lived here
for a lot of years, living off the land
or with the land. So long that the water and
the air, we're part of that. And all that, what you see
around me, is part of me. The first chief here
was Gimiwana'am. English name Rainy. They called him Rainy. The day was a rainy day
when he was born. The next one was Gichi-waabizheshi
or the Big Marten. And Gichi-migizi,
the Great Eagle, was his son. Gichi-migizi's son was
Waabizheshi, or the White Eagle. And he lived here
for a long time. 80-100 years old. And he went down to a man, my great-great uncle,
grandfather named Ed Ackley. And his Indian name was Misaabe,
or the Giant. And for him, he was the brother
to my grandfather Dewitt. And his name is Gigiaashe, the sound of the wind
in the tree and the grass, the wind
when you hear the grass. From him came another chief. His name was Wambash, or John Seymour they called him. When the Indian agent
came to the pay station, they asked him his name and he couldn't understand
the translation so they gave him
the last name Seymour because that's what
the translator said. Wambash,
that man can see more. So that's why he got that name. So it came all the way down
to under him and a few other smaller, they called the chief line,
Ngig. And Oshkaabewis, he was a waiter. He was a Wisconsin River chief. And they all gathered together
at Sokaogoning. So all these are why we're here. All the other tribes have their
genealogy, like I just said, about their chiefs
and their families who led their people
through all these years. And the ones I said here were separate chiefs
and separate people, but all the other tribes
in Ojibwe country, they all knew these people
like relatives because we were. What they called the hierarchy
of the Ojibwe government and the way we lived. I carry that genealogy
in my mind because my grandmother told me to do it. Now, the story I just told you was handed to me by her,
Alice Ackley. And her name was
Waawiye-giizhigokwe, the Sky All Around the World. And her daughter was my mother. And her name was Manoomin-ikwe,
the Manoomin Woman. She made the manoomin. So that was my mother's name. Now I'm here now
at this time of history and for the tribe as Makoons. Now, I'm not the ogimaa
or the chief here, but I'm a member of that family,
the higher elite family of the old Ojibwe government
before 1939. See, we lived here
all them years until 1939 as free Indians. While the other tribes around
Lake Superior all made a treaty in 1854
with the US government, our people were there too. We waited here, though, for that
treaty and the reservation and the promises
by the government to be fulfilled for us. Waiting for
the patent and for the agent and the money
and the farm equipment and the school
which never came. Constantly our leadership
and our family were writing letters
back and forth to the government
in Madison for Wisconsin and the government in Washington, DC, for the treaty, asking when
we're going to be fulfilled. When this road
not too far up here-- It's called Old Military Road. That road was cut through here in the territory in 1869. The chief here at the time was
named Gichi-migizi, or Great Eagle. He watched the road being built. He had his own warriors
and other people working, supplying all these other guys
building the road. So we were sitting here thinking it was
going to be finally fulfilled, a reservation
was going to be established and it never was. They made the road, and they made it
into a mail route for the mining up in Copper Harbor, up in Michigan there,
Lake Superior. And they just kept going
back and forth like they're doing today. And that's why in 1934 when the Howard-Wheeler bill
was passed by Congress and
the United States government, President and other people
at the time decided it was time
to try to keep the promise to some of the Indian tribes
in the nation from the Homestead Act of 1887 which took all the Indian land
and turned it into farmland. Well, through
long investigations from like 1920, the agents came here
to Mole Lake talking to the Indian people
and other people, trying to figure out what
they're going to do with us. So when they got
all the information, I guess they
couldn't deny it anymore. They had to do something. With what little bit of money
that was left from the act and that from other tribes
getting reservations, they finally got
the Mole Lake people 1,800 acres around
this lake here, Rice Lake. And our people
are very happy about that. They were happy
that finally they had a place
where they could call their own. For over 80 years, these people waited and they were getting
pushed around by all the lumber camps
and all the settlers. Every time they would open up
another part of the territory, they would kick
the Indians off here. "You don't live here.
I own this now." So we had to keep moving
constantly around here, trying to stay at this lake
every fall. And that's the history, really, the true history of what my
people have to go through here, through all these years, and then through
what we do now, you know, Mole Lake, in this time frame
where I'm at talking. We have threats from outside, corporations and governments
and other things, for mining and for timber. There's more land
for everything, for the other society. So my job as a young man was to keep
and take care of the land the best way I can
with these prayers. Trying to get some sense
out of how to keep things going when there's a constantly modern
world changing all the time. It's a mind-blowing thing to try every day of your life
to think, "How do you keep this wild,
somewhat wild, "with a society that's developing and
using everything around you?" It's a constant, constant
thinking of how to do that. Indian people, though, we have always this thought about the world going around
some more. What comes around
goes around. That's why we keep praying,
a lot of us, the old people, to keep this all going around. If we don't stop it here,
you know, people, their minds thinking about polluting your water hole and then trying to tell
your kids to drink it. That kind of thought. You have to get away
from that. Keep the water hole clean
for your kids and forget about the money. One of our Indian teachings, because we get this food
from the land and the Earth, when anybody comes by us
or sees us, visits us, we always share
that food with them, even if we only have
a little bit, because it's not ours. Even though we go out here
in nature and pick it and harvest it ourselves,
you know, and get tired and sweat, we know it's not ours. We don't own it. We don't own the seeds. We don't have that Indian patent
on nothing. It's only with the Creator
and the Indian people that we have that. Today, this is the memory
that's coming back. That's why when I talk this way,
I'm talking from the Creator in a spiritual way. We do this
for every day of our lives. I asked permission
to come over here when I woke up this morning. I had good dreams. I had good feelings. That's why we do this. It's always with the gratitude
that the people before us gave us the spirit here in our way of life,
our heritage, and our teachings to carry on when they were gone
and gone to the other world. See, and then my job is to hand it down
to somebody else, another generation. It keeps on going that way. Because if we stop, then the world's going to stop. Simple. But you got to do it every day. You got to have faith that He's going to make
these plants turn green again. Right here,
this grass turning green. The lake is going to come up. the rice is going to come up. That's what this does. You give this to the Creator like he gave it to us
to have peace. And then,
with gratitude and respect, we ask Him like the birds do. We never plant nothing
like that. We only ask Him to bring it out
again for us. When I do this here
for this story, I talk about my people's story, I was told a long time ago
that we got to start this way. ♪ - To learn more about the sovereign Indian Nations
in Wisconsin, visit
WisconsinFirstNations.org. To purchase a DVD of this and
other Tribal Histories programs, visit WPT.org
or call 800-422-9707. - Mole Lake History was funded in part by: Irene Daniell Kress, Francis A. and Georgia F. Ariens
Fund of the Community Foundation
for the Fox Valley Region, Evjue Foundation, Ron and Patty Anderson, Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin
Wisconsin Idea Endowment, Timothy William Trout
Education Fund, National Endowment
for the Humanities, and Friends of
Wisconsin Public Television.
