Origins
Sometime earlier than 1650, the Ojibwe split into two groups near present-day Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. This is believed to have been one of the stops which their prophets predicted in their migration; it was part of the path of the Anishinaabe, which they had traveled for centuries, in their passage west from the Atlantic Coast.
The Ojibwe who followed the south shore of Lake Superior found the final prophesied stopping place and "the food that grows on water" (wild rice) at Madeline Island. During the late 17th century, the Ojibwe at Madeline Island began to expand to other territory: they had population pressures, a desire for furs to trade, and increased factionalism caused by divisions over relations with French Jesuit missions. For a time they had an alliance with the Eastern Dakota.
Beginning about 1737, they competed for nearly 100 years with the Eastern Dakota and the Fox tribes in the interior of Wisconsin west and south of Lake Superior. The Ojibwe were technologically more advanced, having acquired guns through trading with the French, which for a time gave them an advantage. They eventually drove the Dakota Sioux out of most of northern Wisconsin and northeastern Minnesota into the western plains.
The Sioux (Lakota) were pushed to the west, where they eventually settled in the Great Plains of present-day Nebraska and the Dakotas. The Ojibwe successfully spread throughout the Great Lakes region, with colonizing bands settling along lakes and rivers throughout what would become northern Wisconsin and Minnesota in the United States. La Pointe on Madeline Island remained the spiritual and commercial center of the nation. The island is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Read more about this topic: Lake Superior Chippewa
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)