Be ready to blog on this question: How community-minded are the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe people? What specific activities do you find that they engage in as a community -- for example powwows, "sugarbushing" for subsistance, spiritual practices and ceremonies? How important is it to them to feel like part of a community?
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I got my information from the Ojiwe culture...http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/cultureColumn.asp?id=118
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/426328/Ojibwa
The Ojibwe were community minded people. They engaged in many community activites such as sugarbushing. Sugarbushing is the name for trees where they make maple syrup and maple sugar in the springtime. 50 to 100 people would go out to the sugarbush and their families would help. Those who didn't go stayed back would help out by going hunting. So everyobe in the community ends up helping out. Because even if they aren't good at sugarbushing they can find some way to help out which shows how important community is to their culture. campssugarhttp://www.millelacsojibwe.org/cultureColumn.asp?id=200
2.
http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/cultureColumn.asp?id=118
In the summer, the Ojibwe People would gather by the shores of the big lakes. They would go fishing and hunt small game animals.Summer time was when they did most of their planning for the year ahead and figured out what they would need. if they needed a new canoe to go fishing in the fall, they would gather the birchbark for it in the summer.Summer was the most important time for them because thats when they got everything accomplished for the seasons coming up. They also gathered all their food in the summer to save it for the rest of the year.
http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/culture.asp
This page has several links on it that discuss aspects of the Ojibwe culture. A couple specific links i looked at were:
1.)Tradition of Watching Purple Martians.
2.)Living Books
3.)Fall Ricing
http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/cultureColumn.asp?id=155
This link gave me an idea of the various things the Ojibwe people did in respect to their culture.
one thing that i found intresting on the webpage that i found was the naming procedure."The Naming Ceremony, which remembers the sacrifices of Original Man in naming everything, requires that a medicine person be asked by the father and mother to seek a name for their child. The seeking can be done through fasting, meditation, prayer or dreaming and the spirits give the name. At a gathering the medicine person burns tobacco as an offering and pronounces the new name to each of the 4 Directions and everyone present repeats the name when it is called out. The Spirit World then accepts and can recognize the face of the child as a living thing for the first time. The Spirit World and ancestors then guard the child and prepare a place for him or her when their life ends. At the naming ceremony the parents ask for four men and four women to be sponsors for the child. The sponsors publicly vow to support and guide the child. This naming ceremony is thought to have been started by Original Man"
i found this intresting becuause it shows they just dont picka name becuase it sounds cute but becuase it has meaning http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/ojibwa.html
The website I found shows different Ojibwe customs.
http://turtle-island.com/customs.html
Shows Ojibwe spear fishing, ways they make maple sugar and rice, as well as clothing. For example moccasins and colorful quill work the Ojibwe women made.
http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/culture.asp
I found my information from this site. It discusses many aspects of the Ojibwe culture.
1)fishing
2)quilt making
3)gathering food
4)sewing
5)singing on drum & sharing
Everyone in the community helps out because this is important to their culture.
On this website that I googled,
http://www.mpm.edu/WIRP/ICW-51.html, This a paragraph that talks about today's Ojibwe people.''For many, reservation life was and is a constant struggle to support families through interaction with American society and maintain aspects of traditional life. Despite considerable contact and intermarriage with Whites, many traditional practices survive in the strong use of the Ojibwe language as well as religious practices, oral tradition, knowledge of herbal medicines, traditional crafts, and continued reliance on maple sugaring and collecting wild rice. These resources are augmented with some lumbering, seasonal harvesting of off-reservation fruit crops, wage work, and acting as guides for White fishermen as well as wage work and increasing employment in tribal government and tribal enterprises.'' Even though this tribe has gone through some hard times, but this society still stays strong and practices on how to keep there traditions alive. According to one link on hogfiddle, the Ojibwe people still teach there children and grandchildren about the language and traditions that these people have learned when they were young.
This website is about an evil spirit that the ojibwe believed in
..http://cryptozoology.tribe.net/thread/6952fc58-32d0-428a-8d3c-291566ef9fde
The spirit is named wendigo and they believed it could possess people, once possessed they would transform into a ten foot beast and would eat people....its an evil version of bigfoot mixed with a ghost story.
Most of their lands were appropriated by the Americans and Canadians, a fate shared by all native peoples of North America, but plans to deport the Ojibwe to Kansas and Oklahoma never succeeded, and today nearly all Ojibwe reservations are within their original territory.
http://www.native-languages.org/ojibwe.htm
So we have a strong relationship with those powers within the lake, and therefore we don’t want to hurt the lake, or the fish that are there. We are taught as a people to take only what we need, and maybe sometimes take some to share with others from the community who don’t have any. We are taught to stay away from greed. http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/cultureColumn.asp?id=218
In the website i posted, i find it interesting how the Obijwe people separate into family units in the autumn, and then in the summer they meet back up as a community to fish.
How community-minded are the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe people? What specific activities do you find that they engage in as a community -- for example powwows, "sugarbushing" for subsistance, spiritual practices and ceremonies? How important is it to them to feel like part of a community?
-Both groups of people are very community-minded. These groups take great pride in their culture and more often than not find something that's entertaining but also fits into their traditions/culture. According to http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/cultureColumn.asp?id=186, titled "Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe" , there used to be very little time for the Anishinaabe people to find entertainment, because they were so busy trying to find ways to survive. In their tribe, survival was the top priority, so there was no time for nothing else. Even though this was so, most of the poeple within the tribes found their own personal ways to have fun. Most of the men in the group were hunters, while the women stayed at home and made clothes for the entire family. I truly dont see how this was entertaining, but I guess that everyone ahs their own definition of fun. These werent the only things that most of the tribe did for fun.There were also games that were played by the Anishinaabe people. They played games where they had to make most of the equipment most of the time. Usually, any game that involved a board/game pieces of some sort had to be made by the tribe. This may have been time consuming, but I dont believe that they had a problem with this, because it was something else to keep them busy and entertaing themselves.
When it came to spirtuals and traditional dances, the Anishinaabe people had something to do with that too. They had pow wows, which were spirtuals in a way. A number of the dances' titles described an animal or form of nature. Sometimes, I wonder for what purpose did they name the dances the way that they did, but I know that it has something to do with their tribe's beliefs. They also had ceremonials that deeply involves drums. From http://www.millelacsojibwe.org/cultureColumn.asp?id=147, " these ceremonial dances were a opportunity for their people to give their offerings of tobacco, blankets, cloth and food to those powers that they rely on as a people, requesting help for themselves, their families, and community".
From simply reading about their way of life, I realize that these ceremonials were very important to their tribe. If we took the time to actually see what it's like to join their tribes for a couple days, I believe that we would probably be able to see where they're coming from and how much entertainment that they actually do have.
The Ojibwe are very community oriented, all of there ceremonies involve everyone in the tribe. Sweatlodges, singing, dancing, playing the drum are all community driven.
http://www.dream-catchers.org/ojibwe-history.php
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