When Ojibwe historian Brenda Child uncovered the Bureau of Indian
Affairs file on her grandparents, it was an eye-opening experience. The
correspondence, full of incendiary comments on their morals and
character, demonstrated the breathtakingly intrusive power of federal
agents in the early twentieth century.
While telling her own family's stories from the Red Lake Reservation, as
well as stories of Ojibwe people around the Great Lakes, Child examines
the disruptions and the continuities in daily work, family life, and
culture faced by Ojibwe people of Child's grandparents' generation--a
generation raised with traditional lifeways in that remote area. The
challenges were great: there were few opportunities for work. Government
employees and programs controlled reservation economies and opposed
traditional practices. Nevertheless, Ojibwe men and women--fully modern
workers who carried with them rich traditions of culture and
work--patched together sources of income and took on new roles as labor
demands changed through World War I and the Depression.
Child writes of men knocking rice at wild rice camps, work customarily
done by women; a woman who turns to fishing and bootlegging when her
husband is unable to work. She also recounts that one hundred years ago
in 1918-1919, when the global influenza pandemic killed millions
worldwide, including thousands of Native Americans, a revolutionary new
tradition of healing and anti-colonial resistance emerged in Ojibwe
communities in North America: the jingle dress dance. All of them, faced
with dispossession and pressure to adopt new ways, managed to retain and
pass on their Ojibwe identity and culture to their children.
