Ojibwe Quotes

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky

In Ojibwe and Cree culture, leadership didn't mean power; it meant caring.

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books...They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables...I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.

Strong Ojibwe women are like the tide, reminding us of forces too powerful to control. Weak people fear that strength. They won’t vote for a Nish kwe they fear.

There’s an important distinction between writing about trauma and writing a tragedy. I sought to write about identity, loss, and injustice … and also of love, joy, connection, friendship, hope, laughter, and the beauty and strength in my Ojibwe community. It was paramount to share and celebrate what justice and healing looks like in a tribal community: cultural events, language revitalization, ceremonies, traditional teachings, whisper networks, blanket parties, and numerous other ways tribes have shown resilience in the face of adversity. Growing up, none of the books I’d read featured a Native protagonist. With Daunis, I wanted to give Native teens a hero who looks like them, whose greatest strength is her Ojibwe culture and community.

histories. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) historian Jean O’Brien names this practice of writing Indians out of existence “firsting and lasting.” All over the continent, local histories, monuments, and signage narrate the story of first settlement: the founder(s), the first school, first dwelling, first everything, as if there had never been occupants who thrived in those places before Euro-Americans.

Apocalypse?" "Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. I can tell you there's no word like it in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders anyway." Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention. "The world was ending," she went on. "Our world isn't ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that's when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we hade to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here!" She became more animated as she went on. Her small hands swayed as she emphasized the words she wanted to highlight. "But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! Thats when our world ended again. And that wasn't the last time. We've seen what this....what's the world again?" "Apocalypse." "Yes, Apocalypse. We've had that over and over. But we always survived. Were still here. And well still be here, even if the power and the radios don't come back on and we never see any white people ever again.

As brutal and bitter as the winters are in the northern reaches of the Ojibwe homelands, there is a kind of peace that falls over the land in February and March. Or if not a peace exactly, a kind of watchful waiting: April and May will erupt with their usual vernal violence soon enough.

It’s just … in that moment I was pissed you were so eager to go. I hate going, but I thank Creator each time that you’re not with me. I keep hoping your privileges will keep you safe. Your last name. Your light skin. Your money. Your size, even.” Auntie spots Jamie heading back from the grill area and finishes with “I’m thankful for you having those advantages. But I get mad and scared because my Black and Ojibwe daughters don’t.

Whipple called him by his Indian name: Enmegahbowh, which translates from the Ojibwe language as He Who Prays for His People While Standing.

In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships.

The Ojibwe tribe, known to the white-eyes as the Algonquins, named her Misi-ziibi or ‘great river’.” He looks at Linda who has her eyes shaded. He adds, “The French named her Mississippi.

Nector [speaking to Bernadette] could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet.

Listen to me, my girls,” Granny June says. “Strong Ojibwe women are like the tide, reminding us of forces too powerful to control. Weak people fear that strength. They won’t vote for a Nish kwe they fear.

You take one last look and think it would have been something to climb that silo and peek out the window before the interstate plowed through. To see the land unbroken. You are compelled, of course, to consider how the Ojibwe felt, returning to the campsites at Cotter Creek one day only to hear the sound of sawing and the lowing of oxen. Life will circle around on you. Also visible from the silo window is a gigantic billboard pointed at the interstate and advertising a casino owned by the Ojibwe. The billboard says, WINNERS, 24/7.

The buffalo provided the fuel for fires that smoked their own meat.

This time, the rapids sent them through a dark tunnel that seemed timeless, blind, malevolent. A yawning throat of water.

He wondered if he would ever see the inside of one of those houses whose great windows blared sheaves of light. They made huge blurred spears that reached out into the balmy spring darkness.

There was a time when I wondered—do I really believe all of this? I'm half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as it if contained sentient spiritual beings. The question of whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant. After I'd stopped thinking about it for a while, the ritual of offering tobacco became comforting and then necessary. Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

One of Tobasonakwut's favorite phrases is andopawatchigan, which means "seek your dream," but is lots more complicated. It means that first you have to find and identify your dream, often through fasting, and then that you also must carry out exactly what your dream tells you to do in each detail. And then the philosophy comes in, for by doing this repeatedly you will gradually come into a balanced relationship with all of life.

THE YEAR WAS 1988. I had taken a job helping young people on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota to collect the memories of the tribal elders. It was a wonderful job, and tremendously rewarding. As well as working with young people, I had the good fortune to meet and share time with the elders. I sat at their tables, heard their stories, shared their laughter, and felt their sadness. It was a profoundly human time, and I valued it more than I can express.

there would be no sign that Molly Nurmi had ever been. In the time before the cold science of the whites came to Iron Lake, the Anishinaabe believed the water was bottomless. There was a tradition among the Iron Lake Ojibwe. Before they were married, a couple would take strands of their hair and braid a cord. On the day they were wed, they tied the cord around a stone, canoed to the middle of the lake, and dropped the stone into the water. The stone descended forever, they believed

I have come from the Land of the Spirits,” she said in a voice that was both humble and strong. “We have been watching you and we have been distressed at what we have seen. You have allowed this time of scarcity to take you away from the Teachings. Instead of sharing and living in harmony with each other, you steal and fight and plot against each other. Instead of living in gratitude for what you have, you live in anger for what you do not have. Instead of seeking to live in balance

A lesson from my earliest memories of my grandmother Dilsey, who was true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe: Land is not insentient; it is possessed of spirit. Gazing down, I couldn’t help feeling that the fence and all it represented was a great violation of the spirit of the land. The mind-set that gave rise to the fence was a great folly, the idea that a thin wall of steel and the imaginary line it demarcated could stand against the tide that swept across the desert, which was the tide of time and changing circumstance. Politics were of a moment. Sentiments shifted. Nations rose and fell. Steel rusted and crumbled. But the desert and the flow of life across it would continue after that fence was nothing but scattered rubble among the cacti and the fear that built it was long forgotten.

It seemed to Chickadee that those houses held the powers of the world. The ones who built and lived in those houses were making an outsize world. An existence he'd never dreamed of. Almost a spirit world, but one on earth. Chickadee could see that they used up forests of trees in making the houses. He could see that they were pumping up the river and even using up the animals. He thought of the many animals whose dead hides were bound and sold in St. Paul in one day. Everything that the Anishinabeg counted on in life, and loved, was going into this hungry city mouth. This mouth, this city, was wide and insatiable. it would never be satisfied, thought Chickadee dizzily, until everything was gone.

We wolves will forever be in this land, for our spirits run heavy in this place. We are made of the very earth of this land. Our spirits are the moon over the lake, of the vapor of the breaths when we run hard through fields on cold fall nights with the stars all above and around us and shining off the perfect calm of the water. Our spirit is when we are tracking deer on cold winter days, of the chase and the precise timing of the kill, and then sleeping curled together for warmth in deep snow, mouths covered in fresh, dried blood from our feasting. Our spirit is of the dark and wind and perfect stillness before a summer storm and the sounds of slow, rolling thunder off the lake, echoing through the trees. Our spirit is the smell of wet grass and wildflowers, and all the bright colors of the land and water and sky.

She just said nothing. Nothing. She let the silence between them fill the air. Unlike other people, Omakayas had noticed, silence did not make Old Tallow uncomfortable. Now the warrior lady simply stood and smoked her pipe. The smoke drifted serenely in wavering fangs from each corner of her mouth. She was thinking.

In the May 2021 issue of The Atlantic, Ojibwe writer David Treuer wrote a piece entitled “Return the National Parks to the Tribes.” In it, he describes how the US government displaced the Miwok tribe from the land that would, thirty-nine years later, become Yosemite Park.

While I lingered about the old village and the lake, with the water lapping on the shore and the wind whispering in the big pines, I felt for a moment that I was back in time among the Ojibwe families going about their business.

D-Day was a short, sturdy man who watched the world from behind thick glasses set in ancient horn rims. Her carried in front of him a belly that had settled like a gunny sack of potatoes. His white, crew cut hair glistened against his dark skin, his weathered hands whispered of years in the woods peeling pulp for logging companies, and his tongue spoke mostly Ojibwe. He preferred the nuance of his own language, and over time, age and amnesia had taken most of the English he knew and returned it to its source, a shelf of yellowing books in a boarding-school library somewhere far away.

We don’t live in two worlds. We live in one world. We don’t have to code-switch to make it out there. We don’t have to maintain a dual consciousness. People from other cultures don’t have to sacrifice theirs to enter our world, and natives don’t have to sacrifice their cultures to navigate the modern world. We can be exactly who we are—exactly who the creator wanted us to be—and thrive.

You are a complete, fully realized human being. You are a soul who has a body. You are the one your ancestors were praying for and waiting for through the generations. You have been given a unique set of gifts, and you yourself are a gift to the world.

Connection and culture live inside of us. Having a rich cultural life is not just about looking out and looking for; it is about looking within. We can do that where ever we live. The awakening is healing and empowering.

Native hunters have sometimes had a more sensible, more spiritual, closer-to-truth view of wolves (and other predators, including lions and tigers). Recently, Native American groups have tried to block the opening of wolf hunts. When Wisconsin opened hunting for wolves in 2012, Mike Wiggins, chairman of the Bad River Ojibwe Tribe, responded, “Is nothing sacred anymore?” Ma’iingan, the wolf, is sacred to the Ojibwe. “Killing a wolf is like killing a brother,” said tribal member Essie Leoso.

Books. Why? So I can talk to other humans without having to meet them. Fear of boredom. So what I will never be alone.

As with most other reservations, the government policy of attempting to excite pride in private ownership by doling parcels of land to individual Ojibwe flopped miserably and provided a feast of acquisition for hopeful farmers and surrounding entrepreneurs.

He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease.

Although she lived in town, Old Tallow was so isolated by the force and strangeness of her personality that she could have been surrounded by a huge dark forest. She had never had any children, and each of her three husbands had slunk off in turn during the night, never to be seen again. Nobody knew exactly what it was that Tallow, in her younger days, had done to drive them off. It had probably been something terrible. After the last husband left, her face seemed to have gotten old suddenly, though the rest of her hadn’t weakened. She was a rangy woman over six feet in height. She was powerful, lean, and lived surrounded by ferocious animals more wolf than dog.

Each of Old Tallow’s feet seemed to take up as much space as a small child, but Omakayas didn’t mind. Warily, but completely, she loved the fierce old woman.

She told the holy stories and the funny stories, the aadizookaanag that explained how the world came into being, how it continued to be made.

The prairie almost seemed to mock them with its beauty. Every inch of their skin was covered with bites upon bites. Their faces were purple and swollen. The mosquitoes bit through cloth, they bit through hair, they were implacable. Every being suffered. Yet they kept moving.

Life had sprung up along the trail. The thin film of green in the trees had become a cloud of new leaves. Robins, bluebirds, vireos, finches, songbirds of all types made the brush along the trail a wall of sharp melody.

Animikiins used all his skills. But the earth is good at swallowing up all traces of people. At last, in spite Animikiins's great powers, they lost his trail.

I will give you what is in my heart, Rose of the Ojibwe. This poor heart, this poor, poor heart that has loved so little. I am drowning in his ocean. I am dying, and as I die I know less and less. Yet I believe I am drowning in the mystery of his love. This is my faith. On this my whole life is based.

Perspective. Storytellers tell their own stories. They don't mean to. They let their life experiences and ideas slip in between the bits and pieces of history that have come to them. There are so many versions among us, of this first woman, this mother of Manaboozhou, Nanabush, our goofy, loving, mixed up teacher and hero. They are all valid. They are all real. They are all traditional. None of us knows them all by heart. We take the parts that we need and understand. These are the stories that we share with our children. In a sense, that makes us all a little bit like Winona and Epanigishimoog. We are the creators of the Anishnabe generations who come after us. I like that responsibility.

There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I’m going to convert, stupid dog, and become at long last the pagan that I always was at heart before I was Cecilia, when I was just Agnes, until I was seduced and diverted by the music of Chopin.” “That neurasthenic pierogi snarfer!!”, the dog ranted—it had never liked the composer . . . .

Smallpox raced along the network through the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, ricocheting among the Mandan, Hidatsa, Ojibwe, Crow, Blackfoot, and Shoshone, a helter-skelter progress in which the virus leapfrogged from central Mexico to the shore of Hudson Bay in less than two years.

Wolves are the shadow dance partners of humans. The pair cannot exist without the other. We are the same and opposite, yin and yang, shadow and light. Ours is an intricate relationship.