My grandfather's knocking sticks : Ojibwe family life and labor on the reservation / Brenda J. Child.
Material type: TextPublisher: St. Paul, MN : Minnesota Historical Society Press, [2014]Description: 242 pages : illustrations ; 22 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 0873519248
- 9780873519243
- Ojibwe family life and labor on the reservation
- Auginash, Fred, 1888-1957
- Auginash, Jeanette, 1905-
- Ojibwa Indians -- Biography
- Ojibwa Indians -- History -- 20th century
- Ojibwa Indians -- Social conditions -- 20th century
- Ojibwa Indians -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
- Prohibition -- Minnesota -- Red Lake Indian Reservation -- Anecdotes
- Subsistence hunting -- Minnesota
- Wild rice -- Harvesting -- Minnesota
- Red Lake Indian Reservation (Minn.)
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book | Main Library | NonFiction | 977.682 C536 | Available | 33111007950708 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
When Ojibwe historian Brenda Child uncovered the Bureau of Indian Affairs file on her grandparents, it was an eye-opening experience. The correspondence, full of incendiary comments on their morals and character, demonstrated the breathtakingly intrusive power of federal agents in the early twentieth century. While telling her own family's stories from the Red Lake Reservation, as well as stories of Ojibwe people around the Great Lakes, Child examines the disruptions and the continuities in daily work, family life, and culture faced by Ojibwe people of Child's grandparents' generation--a generation raised with traditional lifeways in that remote area. The challenges were great: there were few opportunities for work. Government employees and programs controlled reservation economies and opposed traditional practices. Nevertheless, Ojibwe men and women--fully modern workers who carried with them rich traditions of culture and work--patched together sources of income and took on new roles as labor demands changed through World War I and the Depression. Child writes of men knocking rice at wild rice camps, work customarily done by women; a woman who turns to fishing and bootlegging when her husband is unable to work; and women who carry out traditional healing ceremonies. All of them, faced with dispossession and pressure to adopt new ways, managed to retain and pass on their Ojibwe identity and culture to their children.
Brenda J. Child is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 and Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Child uses her grandparents' story as a gateway into discussion of various kinds of labor and survival in Great Lakes Ojibwe communities, from traditional ricing to opportunistic bootlegging, from healing dances to sustainable fishing. The result is a portrait of daily work and family life on reservations in the first half of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.