Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

George family and are of the Bizhiw or Lynx dodem. Tobasonakwut’s people still tend to be tall, rawboned, rangy (handsome, I think), and with a wariness thatcan shift from kind to belligerent. They are not a people to be trifled with. But for all that, Tobasonakwut is exceedingly gentle. Babies seem to know this. Around my extended family, he’s always the one who sits and talks to the babies. Yet he’s tough in a way people who have been through too much are tough—he can sleep anywhere. Or go for days without really sleeping when his presence is required in ceremonies. Yet although he went hungry as a child, he won’t eat just anything. He’s finicky about his food now. He doesn’t eat much meat, passes on frybread, orders salads in restaurants—unusual eating habits for an Ojibwe. As I said, he’s full of contradictions, like the lake. Tobasonakwut grew up on a spit of land called Niiyaawaangashing, in a time before the Ojibwe or Anishinaabeg were removed from their homes in the islands. He is fortunate to know something of the time when his community was intact, when the bays were dotted with cabins and camps, when his extended family lived more or less by the spiritual seasons of the Midewiwin , the Grand Medicine teachings, and those ceremonial teachings formed the moral and social center of the community. The teachings made sense of the beauties and hardships of Ojibwe existence. He was also unfortunate, for that world was devastated in just a few years. After his people had stabilized their lives and partly recovered from the wave of nineteenth-century invasions and diseases, the Canadian government invented devastating aboriginal policies. It is his burden to have seen what survived of the Ojibwe world around himnearly demolished by death, removal, forced relocation, the poison of alcohol, and to have experienced an education that amounted to kidnapping and a brutal attempt at brainwashing.
    The place where Tobasonakwut grew up, Niiyaawaangashing, is about three or four miles by water from the fishing lodge. It is very useful for us to have a base of operations so close to the places we want to visit, but it is not uncomplicated. Camp owners have become almost the only residents in land that once belonged, and by treaty rights should still belong, solely to the Ojibwe. The only native people staying at the lodge now are the fishing guides, Riel, and two other men. Tobasonakwut once worked as a fishing guide. But he knows and is part of the lake in a much more profound way than where to catch walleyes for wealthy non-Indian sport fishers. He knows the lake in a way that only indigenous people can truly know anywhere.
    His people were the lake, and the lake was them. At one time, everyone who lived near the lake was essentially made of the lake. As the people lived off fish, animals, the lake’s water and water plants for medicine, they were literally cell by cell composed of the lake and the lake’s islands. Tobasonakwut’s father once said to him, The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake . Tobasonakwut shows us the place in the heavens from which the creator descended. Their origins are familiar. The cosmology is in the surrounding landscape, in the stars, in the shapes of the rocks and islands, and in the mazinapikiniganan, the paintings that his people made on the sides of the rocks.
    Niiyaawaangashing
    The next day, we get into a sixteen-foot Alumacraft with a 115-horsepower motor, and we buzz out onto the lake. Before anything else, we go to visit Niiyaawaangashing. There are still two fish-camp houses standing and one tumbled-in cabin of weathered wood. Two docks twisted and upended by ice. A strong little black bear stands next to the first dock, watching us calmly. We cut the motor. The bear slides into the channel and dog-paddles with powerful assurance to the other side, where he doesn’t hide himself at all, but stands up and rakes the