The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights

2 Anishinaabe Culture

2 Anishinaabe Culture 4. A tribal member puts tobacco into the water of the lake as a sacrifice before spearing. Protesters stand behind the spearers and family members on the boat landing. Photo courtesy of Tom Maulson. The social and political conflict in the 1980s over the meaning of renewed Indian access to the living resources of the lands and lakes between their modern villages was accompanied by a cultural renaissance among western Ojibwe communities. This renewal and the ways in which the conflict were organized and improvised have long and deep historical roots that cannot be understood apart from Anishinaabeg culture. In particular among their traditional beliefs and practices, the special value that the Ojibwes placed on their relationships with nonhuman entities and their attitudes toward warfare helped shape their actions and reactions to events during the ‘‘Walleye War.’’ the midewiwin and the fur trade The Algonquian-speaking communities that lived in the upper Great Lakes region traditionally gathered in their largest concentrations at spring and summer fishing sites. As summer wore on, extended family groups fished, picked berries, and gathered wild rice when it ripened; they often returned to the fishing sites for autumn spawning runs. During the winter, people hunted, separating into extended families. In the late winter, a few families came together at the sugar bush to make maple sugar (Cleland 1982; Ritzenthaler 1978:746–747). None of these Algonquian-speaking communities called themselves ‘‘Ojibwes’’ at the time of white contact in the seventeenth century (Hickerson 1963:70). Only one relatively small group referred to itself by an apparently related and likely parent term. Becoming a single people who would be called and call themselves ‘‘Ojibwe’’ and later ‘‘Chippewa’’ was a process that took place during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This reimagining of identity occurred in a transformed world produced by contact with fur-trading Europeans, a transformation experienced as an indigenous cultural renaissance 32 Anishinaabe Culture and remembered as a migration. The emblem of this change was a ceremonial complex known to us as the Midewiwin.1 The Midewiwin was a society of shamans, graded into degrees, who cured and killed using ‘‘herbs, missiles, medicine bundles and other objects which had medicinal properties’’ (Hickerson 1970:52). The ceremonial complex’s purpose was to prolong the life of the community by increasing and distributing spiritual power. Initiation into the society required gifts and fees for the initiators. According to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, trade goods were required or preferred, an aspect of the Midewiwin that has not been fully appreciated. Trade goods such as European-made beads were easily assimilated into an indigenous system of values in other ways dissimilar to the Europeans’ (Hamell 1983). When considered as a series of exchanges, the so-called initiation fees were ultimately procured by hunting and trapping, the most fundamental of relations between indigenous people and the nonhuman world. The bodies of animals were transformed into material wealth that both signaled personal distinction and produced social distinction. The capacity to take animals and accumulate furs itself was a sign of spiritual power; initiation into the Midewiwin thus validated and constituted new social identities. The Midewiwin represented a historically unprecedented realization of pimadaziwin, ‘‘life in the fullest sense, life in the sense of health, longevity, and well-being, not only for oneself but for one’s family.’’ To realize pimadaziwin was to be a wealthy person . It was achieved by ‘‘individuals who sought and obtained the help of superhuman entities and who conducted themselves in a socially approved manner’’ (Hallowell 1955:360). The Midewiwin ceremony flourished in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in an Ojibwe world that was simultaneously being depopulated by disease (Schlesier 1990), reorganizing as multitribal refugee villages in response to Iroquois incursions (White 1992:1– 49), and growing more affluent from the fur trade. Non-Indian presence in the Great Lakes and whites’ interest in animal skins were made meaningful in the context of the Midewiwin. The influx and ceremonial distribution of wealth entailed by the ceremony reconfigured social relationships and created new social groups. The Midewiwin ceremonies were held at spring fishing sites, where people took consciousness of themselves as a single people; ‘‘the Midewiwin reinforced social ties among these groups and spread a common body of tradi- Anishinaabe Culture 33...