I found this beautiful article about the migration of the Anishanabe that I wanted to share here, as a follow up to my earlier post about the Anishanabe who were the first peoples of Michigan.
https://www.dibaajimowin.com/tawnkiyash/the-migration-of-the-anishinabe
Spring is here in its northern way, with unexpected delights and disruptions–the wild turkey toms proudly displaying in the midst of old snow and random automobiles–a flock of starlings taking over the trees in our yard—two ducks hanging out in the brook. A small group of us celebrated with ritual on the Equinox to welcome these disruptive forces into our lives, to undo the stuck places we’ve found ourselves, and make room for new growth, new movement. We used a frozen bowl of ice, in which we placed candles, to symbolize the thawing times.
We do still have snow or ice over most of the yard, but each day another small patch of brown grass appears; our neighbor was already out raking in her snow-free yard. In the middle of this, two days ago, my car was rear-ended as I was driving the on-ramp toward the highway after grocery shopping in town. No one was hurt, thankfully, though my car is now in the shop waiting for the insurance bureaucracy to authorize repairs. I was able to drive it home from the scene, and take out the groceries, being careful to go through and watch for broken glass in the bags.
Still, it shook me up with the vulnerability that is life. We never know which day might be the last. And meanwhile I’ve been watching a show on Netflix called “Last Chance to See” which follows Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine as they make a journey in 2009 to visit endangered animals that were first documented twenty years earlier by Mark and Douglas Adams (author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Stephen Fry brings a comedic voice to their adventures as the urban klutz who doesn’t usually traipse about in nature. (I recognized his voice from the movie version of Hitchhiker’s Guide.)
But underneath that veneer of comedy is wonder and grief. The final episode was originally going to be about the Yangtze river dolphin, but the dolphins were declared extinct in 2007. So instead, they search for blue whales. Mark tells Stephen that blue whales, the largest animals ever on the planet, have been here for forty million years. Forty million years. And now they are endangered, along with so many others.
I was caught up in the awe Stephen and Mark experienced in getting up close to these majestic beings. I was filled with amazement at the beauty of this complex interwoven planet that we have been blessed to inhabit. And I tapped into the grief that has been haunting so many of us these days. Grief for the demise of so many beings. Grief for the losses that are being propelled by human activity.
I feel so powerless to stop this roaring train that “western civilization” has become. Perhaps there is nothing we can do to save all that is dying. All I could think to do was to let myself choose conscious gratitude and love–gratitude and love for the utter wonder of life on our planet. Gratitude and love for the animals and plants that are our elders and companions. Gratitude and love in the midst of grief.
Starlings in the trees.
In an earlier post, I began to explore which Indigenous people belonged to the land where my East Frisian ancestors had settled in the 1850s. But I had not done that for the land where I was born, in Detroit, Michigan. I wasn’t surprised to read that it was Anishanaabe land, the land of the people of the three fires, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Potawatomi. Significantly, I didn’t learn about them while I was growing up. Nothing. But as a young adult, that changed as I became an activist. I remember participating in an Anishanaabe gathering in Muskegon, Michigan. I found the button I still have from that gathering, the “Great Lakes Anishinabe Treaty Conference,” in 1982.
The Anishinaabek were really the first Indigenous peoples that I learned about. It has been so long since I lived in Michigan (I left in 1983), that it is hard to remember too many details about what I learned at that time, rather than later. I remember a children’s book written by Edward Benton-Banai, in which I learned the word for grandmother was Nokomis. I remember that sovereignty was important, and treaties had historically been tools for taking land away from the people, but they also preserved certain rights to hunting and fishing. Louise Erdrich is a brilliant Anishinaabe novelist from whom I learned much more of the people’s lives in the context of colonization.
The Anishinaabek lived in the area of the Great Lakes before any Europeans arrived. I learned from Roger Paul, in my Wabanaki Languages class, that the Anishinaabek were related to the Wabanaki many generations ago, and lived on the east coast. About a thousand years ago, they were led to move west, and they were guided to stop in the Great Lakes. The Anishinaabe languages are in the same language family as the Wabanaki, (and the Innu as well), called Algonquian by linguists. The word for “my grandmother” in Passamaquoddy is Nuhkomoss. The Innu would say, Nukum.
The first Europeans who interacted with the Anishinaabek in the Great Lakes region were the French. When Michigan later became a territory of the new United States, the majority of people living in Michigan were Native people. You can find out many more details of the history of the people from that time forward on the website of the Ziibiwing Center of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan. Michigan still has twelve federally recognized tribes today.
I think the first step in the process of making right relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is to learn the history of our peoples’ interactions with each other, to understand the traumatic process of colonization that occurred on these lands. Only if we know the history can we begin to make sense of the present. With the mixed blessing of the internet, it isn’t so hard to find out these things if we look. Do you know what Indigenous people lived on the land which you now occupy?
Photo by John Gaudi/CBC
I just learned today that Angela Andrew, an Innu artist in what is now Labrador, best known for her crafting of traditional Innu tea dolls, died February 5th at the age of 72. I posted earlier about the Innu tea doll that my friend Wells gave me, which was created by her. I found this article in the CBC News from Canada. I am so glad I learned about her and her tea dolls before she died. The article said she was also instrumental in teaching the Innu-Aimun language to young people, and she had an infectious smile. If you can hear me in the spirit world, Angela, thank you for your beautiful work! her daughters plan to continue making the dolls.
Can learning about our own ancestors help white people in undoing white supremacy and colonization? Or could it possibly be a distraction from the real work? When did our ancestors become “white” instead of German or Ukrainian or French or Irish? How did it happen? If our ancestors owned land, when and how did that happen, especially in relationship to the stealing of land from Indigenous peoples?
We were talking about these questions in my Maine-Wabanaki REACH group last night. It has been helpful to join in a small group with other white folks committed to the process of ending racism and colonization. We ponder the difficult questions together, in the context of the wider work of Maine-Wabanaki REACH which is in conversation and solidarity with Wabanaki people.
It seemed to us that understanding our families’ histories in the context of colonization, can help us to better understand colonization, and to make it visceral and real for us. It is not just recounting the stories we may have heard in our families, or read about in research, but juxtaposing those stories with the history of colonization, land theft, and slavery, in the particular locations in which they lived.
I have already done a lot of exploring of the matrilineal side of my family. Last night, after the meeting, I wondered how this might have played out on the other side of my family–my patrilineal ancestry. My dad’s ancestors came to this country from Germany. But more specifically, his great-grandfather and great-grandmother arrived in Illinois as children in 1851 and 1854 from East Friesland. East Friesland was actually a somewhat isolated culture on the North Sea with its own community and language, in some ways more closely related to Holland and old English than German.
Thousands of East Frisians came to the midwest during the middle of the 19th century, drawn by the promise of cheap fertile land and a long-standing love of freedom. Most of them worked for a few years, then were able to buy land, and become successful farmers, from what I can gather. In America, they formed closely knit communities centered around their church, their family and their language. But over the course of three generations, the young people had assimilated into the surrounding communities, and no longer spoke their parents’ language.
By the time the East Frisians arrived in Illinois, it had already been colonized for several generations. But the name gives a clue. On the Illinois State Museum website, I read about the Illinois peoples losing their lands.
In 1803, the Kaskaskia tribe signed a treaty giving up its land claims in the present State of Illinois in exchange for two small reservations on the Kaskaskia and Big Muddy rivers. The Peoria, in turn, ceded their Illinois claims in a separate treaty signed in 1818. Finally, in 1832, two years after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, the Kaskaskia and Peoria tribes agreed to merge and moved west to a reservation in Kansas.
So I wonder if the German immigrants even knew about the history of the land they were so excited about farming? More research surely to do about all that.
In the course of this research, I may have coincidentally solved a mystery that had recently emerged in my DNA reports. According to my DNA analysis, 15.3% of my ancestors came from the British Isles. But from my genealogy research, I thought that number should be just 3% (my Scottish ancestry). I didn’t think I had any other British or Irish ancestry. So what was that other 12%? Was there some family secret I hadn’t heard about? Well, I learned online that East Frisian DNA is indistinguishable from that of the British Isles. So rather than a secret in the family tree, I think this 12% might be my great-grandfather Henry Johnson (also known as Heinrich Jansen), who was 100% East Frisian.
And when did they become white? Well, I’ve got to stop for today, but I’ll come back to it. In the meantime, a 1920 census with Henry Johnson listed–see between the blurred out parts. And the “W” next to his name.
Finding Our Way Home 