Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance by Heidi Bohaker (review)

Winner of the Canadian Historical Association’s 2020 award for Best Book in Canadian Political History, Heidi Bohaker’s Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance is a remarkable work. Thoroughly scholarly yet deeply embedded in Indigenous community-based knowledge, it is a legal history that expands a field usually viewed as only concerned with the study of European-derived legal institutions and theories of jurisprudence. Bohaker argues that Anishinaabe, especially those of the eastern Great Lakes, developed socio-culturally distinctive political traditions through which they created mechanisms of governance and enacted political decisions. They thus possessed both the means to govern themselves and a tradition of governance practice or law. The practices of Anishinaabe governance were located in different social spaces than the courts of law and halls of parliament where Europeans and their North American descendants expected to find what they termed the instruments of government. Anticipating written law codes and legal institutions inhabited by professionals possessed of arcane, specialized knowledge, non-Natives over-looked the evidence of Anishinaabe political practices, giving rise to views of Anishinaabe as lacking both conceptualizations of law and legal processes by which political actions were undertaken.

Bohaker combines reclaimed Anishinaabe cultural knowledge with exhaustive research in archival documents and a strong ethnohistorical sensibility, blending history’s interest in change over time with anthropology’s emphasis on cultural continuity. In addition, she brings a deep appreciation for material history, for physical items that encode historical information such as Anishinaabe doodem marks affixed to treaty documents, articles of clothing, weaponry, and photographs. These multiple angles of vision have enabled her to reposition the older interpretations of Anishinaabe governance, including such important facets as treaty making, while simultaneously expanding our understandings of Anishinaabe kinship practices and gender relations as they structured community decision-making and governance.

Anishinaabe conceptualized governance as creating alliances between social groups that included humans, other-than-humans, the land itself, and additional “ensouled beings” (27) of the Anishinaabe world. Building upon this expansive understanding of the persons comprising social collectivities, Anishinaabe created two complex institutions that shaped their practices of governance, the doodem and the council fire. Bohaker demonstrates that doodem – expansive, exogamous patrilineal kin groups – represented Anishinaabe political collectivities that vested a small number of their members – generally, an ogimaa and an anikeogimaa – with the authority to transact negotiations on behalf of their kindred. Doodem were, in Bohaker’s words, “the who of Anishinaabe governance” (xxvi; emphasis added).

The second site of governance – the council fires – were both physical and metaphorical places on the land where the people belonging to that place gathered to discuss community concerns and implement local decisions. The local council fires also formed larger “general” (19) councils that were responsible for decisions affecting their members. These allied council fires met regularly to decide such issues and were hosted in sequence by the individual constituent fires that composed them. Council fires were the most legible of the Anishinaabe institutions to French and British colonizers (as well as later settler scholars) and were often identified as the locus of tribal government. Interpreting the Native world through the cultural constructions of their own male-dominant, class-based societies, colonizers and later settlers assumed tribal governing bodies were like their own, composed of important adult men who possessed power denied to others, especially women. But Anishinaabe constructed gender and power differently, viewing political constituencies as comprised of Elders, women, and warriors who were linked together by inter-group alliance relationships among them. In a remarkable archival find, Bohaker has located two treaty documents that include the doodem and signatures of leaders of Anishinaabe women’s councils. In combination with reclaimed Anishinaabe cultural knowledge, this material evidence expands our understanding of the Anishinaabe past, realigning our understandings of the exercise of political power and governance to reflect Anishinaabe lived reality rather than the perspectives of colonizers and settlers. Simultaneously, Bohaker’s attention to source materials serves as...