Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What historical context leads to the Ojibwe nation's story?
I'm Ramtin Adablui. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Up until this point in the series, we've been talking about the birth of the United States as a nation and how different groups of people pushed for the expansion of what it meant to be American.
But the reality is, Native people inhabited the land that we now call the United States long before Europeans set foot on North America. And as the U.S. continued to grow and expand, Native peoples had different experiences and relationships with the strangers that arrived on their shores.
Today on the show, NPR reporter Sequoia Carrillo and ThruLine producer Anya Steinberg bring us the story of the Ojibwe people and how in the face of U.S. westward expansion, they created a nation to try to preserve their land and way of life. That story after a quick break.
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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.
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Chapter 3: How did the Ojibwe people migrate to the Great Lakes region?
And so he said, I want them to build a house for every single one of you. I want them to build a grist mill and a sawmill so that we can adopt these modern enterprises and have good homes. And to make sure they actually got these things, Holna Day had a plan. They would all stay put until the reservation was built. Don't go anywhere.
If you go, we will lose our leverage to get those things, which are promised to us in this treaty. But times were really tough, and some people left in search of a better life. It also became clear that the Americans were not living up to their side of the bargain. And Holna Day said, well... If they're not going to work with me, we might have to do this a different way.
And he said, I'm going to go back to Washington, D.C.
He set out on a late June day in 1868.
But on his way... He was accosted by assassins. Pulled off of his carriage, stabbed multiple times, shot and killed.
The impact of this death was immediate.
It was devastating for many of his people. And it was devastating for generations.
Holenday's death created a power vacuum that resulted in the loss of more and more Ojibwe land.
You had lots of white settlement that immediately flowed after his death. And so, you know, it was devastating for his friends and it was devastating for his enemies in the long run.
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