OBJIWE 03292022 Day 137

The Ojibwe is one of the largest tribes in the United States and Canada, and lived originally along both shores of the Great Lakes as far west as the Turtle Mountains, North Dakota. They are of Algonkian stock and in the north are closely related to the Cree and Maskegon tribes. In the south, through Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota they have always been closely associated with the Ottawa and Pottawatomi.

All of our Ojibwe residents in Wisconsin and those in Michigan and Minnesota were forest Indians and, as such, great hunters, although they cultivated maize in a small way. They made very superior birch bark canoes and were at home on the many lakes of the northland, subsisting largely on fish and game. Their headdress consisted of otter skin caps, often embellished with eagle feathers, one for each enemy slain in battle and consequently for each scalp secured. The great feathered bonnet was not of their culture, but has been more recently borrowed from the Plains Indians. They never used the tepee of the Plains Indians, but built a wigwam. The wigwam was easily constructed in a half-day’s time. Poles were thrust into the ground in a circle of from twelve to twenty feet, their tips bent and securely tied in the center with basswood bark cord to form a hemisphere, about eight feet in height at the center. The whole was then covered with bark of balsam, or woven cat-tail mats and roofed with birch bark. An entrance and smoke hole were left and mats thrown upon the ground. It was much warmer than a tepee and better adapted to the heavy snow fall of the north, and to low temperatures. All of their storage houses and their smaller sweat lodges were similarly made. Their medicine lodges followed the same construction though they were much longer: being eighty, a hundred and even a hundred and fifty feet in length.

Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians