Anton Troyer

The story goes back over a thousand years to how Ojibwe people first came to the Great Lakes region.

It feels different when your family has been buried in the same place longer than America has been a country.

This is Anton Troyer.

He's a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University.

For him, the story of how the Ojibwe people ended up calling these lakes home is a personal one.

At one point in time, just a couple thousand years ago, we lived on the east coast, Atlantic coast, which was a land abundant in small game, big game, well suited for indigenous agriculture, lots of fish in the sea, lots of fish in inland lakes.

We can track the beginning of Ojibwe people to Algonquian language tribes from the east coast.

We had prophets who appeared and said, move west to the land where food grows on water.

It was a reference to the wild rice.

And there was a long migration, and it was a long, slow process.

For centuries, Ojibwe people kept moving.

And as a result, we ended up spanning a huge geography thousands of miles.

until they made it to the Great Lakes region.

But even then, movement was still a part of life.

Because of this persistent migration pattern over a long period of time, if someone got too bossy or even just got too much influence, someone else was usually moving down the river and saying, they're not my chief.

So Ojibwe culture tended to be very tolerant of cultural variation, but very intolerant of being told what to do.

There was no such thing as a national Ojibwe identity.

So there was no such thing as an Ojibwe nation.

It's important to note that that was a new development, and it naturally met with a lot of resistance.

Hole in the Day had big dreams to lead the Ojibwe people, and his ideas were starting to work.