An Ojibwe Story and Our Lives Today - Coming Together As Peoples

This article references several others. It is difficult to describe these stories in one go as the subjects are very complex. For a fuller understanding of the traditional Ojibwe subjects that are covered, read "Water for Generations - Ojibwe Traditions and Resisting Drought" and "Indigenous Knowledge and Being a Steward of the Environment"

_________________________________________________________________________

An Ojibwe Story and Our Lives Today - Coming Together as Peoples

With each new piece I learn as I am taught about Ojibwe culture and its stories, I am always astounded by the beautiful living world we live in. How everything moves, what it means for everything that is alive, and what it means to be alive amongst it all are central to the traditional Ojibwe people and traditional peoples worldwide.

Everything that I write about, I try to capture the lessons I am taught over time and how they connect. The worldview that I am only just beginning to understand lends itself to learning and thinking about these things. How someone understands the environment is different for everybody – culture, background, personal experiences, and much more all have a key role to play. I’ve had to learn to step away from the strictly Western thinking that I have learned overtime and be open to the possibilities of what could be. There is so much out there that simply cannot fit into a strict scientific perspective or even a more general Western one. That said, worldviews have their strengths, and one cannot overpower the other.

Knowledge Transfer and Knowing the Environment

Many of these stories about the environment don’t fit into that Western box, instead following the logic of the environment and how everything affects everything around it. While there may not be a study that understands and proves, for example, how forests communicate, traditional peoples have used this knowledge to survive and thrive for ages in their respective environments. The things I am being trained in by David Scott follows closely with that, as the traditional Ojibwe people were taught this logic from a very early age.

The Ojibwe language doesn’t use the word “don’t”. When Dave decided to climb a tree as a young kid, his dad simply said, “If you climb that tree you’ll break your arm.” Similarly, kids of the community were strongly encouraged to go out into the forests and observe different communities of animals on their own without guidance and form their own logic. They spent time with the old people, who were always around to teach kids, answer questions, and develop their skills and thinking about the environment. Kids were encouraged to explore and engage with the land, building their own logical thinking and understanding of the environment. All the way along the process, stories were told that provided insights into the environment in easy-to-remember ways in a language that added an immense amount of detail. So much of their day-to-day actions involved teaching about the environment and being a strong human being living within it that much of the time, the young people didn't even know they were being taught generationally transferred knowledge, as Dave has noted.

As the young people grew older, they were given more responsibilities by their elders and took charge of different areas of the environment and traditional life. Some were taught to be hunters of certain species, others managed beavers and waterways, and others watched the weather and the skies. Living so closely to the processes of the ecosystem of their area, knowledge was survival. It is a mistake to believe these peoples were primitive in any way, as their continuous search for knowledge to help their way of life led them to become a living part of the environment and flourish while doing so - just not in a way we are familiar with today. There were once many specializations of this knowledge, from understanding weather and storms, reading the stars and the landscape, managing ecosystems with fire, remembering thousands of stories and songs, and many more - all transferred to the next generation by word of mouth alone.

While there may not be a generic form of science in Ojibwe culture, its obvious that they deeply understood what was happening around them and the reasons why things happened. It is silly to believe that traditional knowledge has little to say about the ecological problems we are having now. As I have highlighted in previous articles, many of the processes we are seeing today were spoken about by the old people who still lived their traditions. Likewise, within these stories about, for example, the decay of forests to ants and fungi, there are clear and quick solutions.

To a traditional Ojibwe, these whole picture of these stories are easily understood from the cultural context they come from, though even someone from a Western perspective can quickly grasp their full meaning with time. And that's the point of why I'm taking time to highlight how traditional Ojibwe people understand the environment. Anybody can understand what is happening in the environment from this perspective as opposed to a strict western scientific one, provided they take the time to step out of the box they are used to. The subjects I have been taught and shared on this blog follow that same strong Ojibwe logic that pertains directly to living within the environment - and anybody can grasp it. It doesn't take a PhD to survive on the land and live with the environment or "prove" what is happening in our own back yard. With all that said, let's get into it.

Speakers of the Language of the Environment

When learning new words in the old Ojibwe, it can take weeks or even months to fully grasp their meanings - much of which has to do with the cultural context the words come from being so different from English. Some words provide windows into this context, such as the word for sapling in Ojibwe, which refers to them as "baby trees" in the "family" of the forest. The familial and personhood aspects of the word describe how trees have relationships with each other and how they are valued as equal to human beings, something that is far easier to describe with firsthand examples out on the land. The words for storms from different directions and the clouds that proceed them are a window into what life on the prairie was once like. Other broader words such as "Obehmaatizee" and a handful of others describe the earth as a whole living thing, with everything within that being of value and having a role in their ecosystem - including humans.

In Ojibwe culture, languages extend to animals too. Dave and I have observed many different birds, beavers, deer, and other creatures communicating in their own way. I recently learned how birds communicate, using their various songs to mean different things. All the time, birds will sing one song, meaning everything is okay, no predators, they've found food, etc., letting the other birds know how things are in their area of the forest. If a predator shows up, they'll sing an alarm call, letting everyone know to be on watch. I've frequently seem them communicate species to species, with some birds, such as robins or blue jays, using their alarm call to try and scare away the others from a food source they just found. All the time throughout the forest these birds sing their language of what is happening around them in real time, warning each other, playing tricks on each other, and socializing in ways I never realized. The best time to observe this is after a rain, where you'll hear their happy songs all around.

Languages aren't limited to just animals, however. As all things are counted as living in traditional Ojibwe culture, even storms, ecological cycles, and many other complex processes have their own language. As I wrote about before, the weather has distinct old Ojibwe words that describe its different phenomenon as living. The cycles of weather had to be closely monitored in a time where people lived in teepees on the open plains. But beyond that, they understood the language and danger signals of when the weather cycles would change, how they as a people could impact that (planting trees, holding back water, etc.), and much more. Dave has told me that the old people once tasted rainwater and snow to tell them about the weather that has come through.

Likewise the language of landscapes was a key part of Ojibwe culture. One example I learned recently is that the forest of the south of Manitoba and surrounding areas help the forests of the north with rain and other weather. Through the process of trees releasing water into the area and creating rain and the weather and wind patterns at the time, moisture was proliferated throughout what is now Manitoba. Along with that, people, such as the Cree in the north and the Ojibwe in the south, would influence and maintain this cycle using controlled burns to maintain the forests' health. Nowadays, this connection is broken between this landscape, as much of the south is deforested from what it once was and water is drained rapidly.

These cycles and many more were understood as part of a larger picture. Weather and cycles of natural areas like these happen worldwide, adding to the Ojibwe perspective that the whole earth is a living, breathing thing with a language of its own. Using this knowledge of the patterns of the natural world combined with the traditional history still alive today in my community, its easy to see now how these cycles are changing rapidly.

Our World Today

Western science has its strengths, but it also has its blind spots. It's precision and breaking down of everything into its minutest form is an understanding of its own. Ojibwe people never understood the chemical make up of trees or the atoms that form them, but what the traditional people do very well understand is what happens in the environment on both a small and broad scale, what are its danger signs of decay, and what happens when it begins to die. When we look at this traditional knowledge, it is very important to note that it is about survival - every part of knowing these things comes back to understanding how to protect the ecosystems around us to create a healthy and flourishing environment for the next generation and fixing it when it goes awry.

We are already seeing an overwhelming amount of signs from the traditional perspective of things going wrong in the environment. On the small scale, Dave and I have seen reptile species declining, key indicator plants growing stunted, creeks going dry that never used to be dry, booms in insect populations, and many more. On the larger scale, we've seen the weather change dramatically over time, with key winds that were once "highways" for birds moving from positions they've been in for years, rain and snow falling in rapidly changing patterns compared to traditional history, and many other worrying signs. So much is changing so rapidly that Dave is having a hard time using tools he has utilized for years in the field, as signs he reads have been altered by the warming climate. Many of these things are what the old people talked about would happen in the future - fires and smoke filled skies, dust lifting off the land, waterways being unusable, insects taking over forests, drought, and a time of struggles for the traditional Ojibwe people using the land.

The fires up north are troubling to people like Dave and me and our community. It is clear to us that the scale and intensity of the forest fires are part of a cycle of decline in the environment - a lack of moisture on the landscape everywhere, the decline of people maintaining the forests, and a rapidly changing climate. This is coupled with the increasing desertification we have observed on the prairies. There was a time when beaver dams scaled every elevation and captured every drop they could, holding back massive amounts of water that would proliferate into the landscape and influence the weather. Nowadays, plants and animals are struggling to get the clean water they need and the extreme dryness and heat is taking a toll.

From traditional peoples, this is the language of our ecosystems calling for our help. Using this Ojibwe logic as well as the weather trends we're seeing reported in Western science spheres, its obvious why fires, drought, and heat waves have been impacting the land we live on. When water is drained, trees removed, and key animals like beavers are killed, the very cycles that traditional peoples strived to maintain for their own security for thousands of years are dramatically altered.

The Traditional Meaning of Treaty and Its Relation to the Land

The many peoples of North America and beyond did not maintain the land on their own nor were they isolated from one another. Trade was frequent and far ranging, and Dave and I have found stones tied to the trade with the "mountain peoples" of the far south. Horses played an integral role in this trade, and various groups such as the Snake tribes traveled up and down the Great Plains. Knowledge and treaties were key components of this trading, many of which treaties still stand today.

As is the traditional understanding of Treaty, these people understood that they shared the land with other groups, each with their own way of living and each maintaining it for future generations. According to Dave, a large number of the Indigenous peoples of North America had their own cultural "laws" very similar to Obehmaatizee, meaning, with the exception of some warlike groups, they firmly respected each others tribal areas. Instead, they traded knowledge of medicines, stories, tools, land management techniques, and much more to better their lives and the land they lived on.

Using the English word "territory" completely misses the way traditional peoples looked at where they lived. In the western sense, a territory is a boundary of ownership for the people strong enough to hold it. The Ojibwe and the surrounding peoples understood that what they did on their areas would affect each other and that the strength of their treaty neighbors was tied to their own strength. Oftentimes, if tribe or sub-tribal group was hungry and could not obtain the food they needed in their own areas, the another tribe would give them access to food in their own areas. Likewise, if one tribe had knowledge or a particular skill the other tribe needed, they would trade individuals to teach one another. In this way, the strict borders of the Western world did not apply. When living off of the land under the mercy of the weather and seasons, everyone had to look at one another as just another human being regardless of language or culture.

Traditional Ojibwe people still remember and maintain many of these treaties, thousands of which still exist today. As the settlers arrived, treaties for knowledge sharing were made with the intention of cooperation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples who shared and survived off the land. The Mennonites of the Morden-Winkler area had one such treaty, an alliance between persecuted peoples where Mennonites and Ojibwe agreed to support each other and to teach each other how to survive and thrive on the prairies. Unfortunately, the colonial government of Canada had the western definition of territory and treaty in mind, believing that the Ojibwe "owned" the land and had the right to give it away on a piece of paper. The Ojibwe forced the issue and had the government sign treaty, understanding the perspective the British were coming from, but also knowing that traditional treaties can stand for a long time. To this day, the treaty relationship between the many peoples of Manitoba still stands with the imperative that we must learn to live with one another, share the land, and sustain it for future generations.

Treaty Today

There is much we can learn from the treaty-making of traditional peoples. The old people and elders of that era knew that we are all tied to the land no matter how removed our societies might be from it living with it. The old people once warned of invisible lines on the ground that would separate us. Today, we are broken up into property lines and acres, and the landscape is covered in square-mile gravel roads that travel directly through once thriving watersheds, wetlands, and pristine ecosystems. Politics creates even more division, making us think that it is the biggest thing that someone stands for something else - creating hatred for even their very next door neighbor and misconstruing what's really important.

According to Dave, what's missing is responsibility - rights are legal issues, while responsibilities are moral ones. Rights have become central to the conversation - property rights, trespassing, freedom to do with the land as we please as long as it's in our little square plot, just stay out of our business. What Dave is more concerned about is the responsibility to maintain healthy environmental conditions, to not pollute clean water that we and the systems that maintain our way of life need, to not destroy forests that create rain - rain that is desperately needed up north. Ultimately, Dave believes the conversation about the responsibilities should be centered around creating a viable world for future generations and learning to live together regardless of divides in culture, race, politics, or religion. We will always need a way to grow food, clean and plentiful water, and the strong ecosystems that make that possible.

The Message of the Traditional Ojibwe

As I've said before, the Ojibwe have words for these cycles. If these words exist, they've happened before, and there is a way to solve them. We can and must learn from traditional cultures worldwide. As human beings, we are all tied to the land and we all struggle in the same way whether we are hundreds of miles or years apart.

It was through building friendships between peoples, breaking down barriers, maintaining the land, and sharing knowledge that the Ojibwe thrived as a people.  That is the purpose of treaty relationships - many that still stand today. That is why Dave, me, and many others are striving to rebuild relationships, and teach whoever we can.

All this article together is just part of the meaning of Obehmaatizee, according to Dave. People are people: no matter what group they are from, no matter what beliefs they have, we share this land that sustains us. That is the message of the traditional Ojibwe.