Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country Read Free

grew up in the Turtle Mountains. My family is still there so I visit as often as I can. I like to imagine Nenaa’ikiizhikokiban dancing with one of my mother’s aunts, maybe Jane or Shyoosh.
    Baby Nenaa’ikiizhikok also has my mother’s name, Rita. So she’s a grandmotherly little baby, I guess. She even has one gray hair growing on the back of her head. I’m old to be a new mother of course, and so’s her dad. Our baby was born a great-aunt. But we won’t get into that. As my brother Ralph says, a look of distress on his face, “Don’t say anymore about it! I knew she’d be something like a great-aunt already! I just don’t want to know!”
    Right now Kiizhikok is playing with her baby cell phone.
    The plastic cell phone keeps saying “yellow triangle.” It is a teaching cell phone. She drops it and picks up her teaching hammer. It says, “Can we fix it? Yes, we can!” She drops it, and picks up a musical box that lights up and plays bits of Mozart and Bach. She drops that and picks up a bright baby tape recorder that plays her late great-uncle Kwekwekibiness singing the Lake of the Woods song,which was given to the people in dreams by the lake itself. Eventually, she turns that off. Eats a cracker. As befits a child born with a gray hair, she is a very philosophical baby, personable and good-natured. She fusses for perhaps five minutes. Sleeps for two hours as we travel along a highway that was expanded from a road that was once a trail, an old Ojibwe trade route, heading north.
    Songs traveled this route, and ceremonies, as well as pelts and guns. Medicines, knowledge, sacred shells, and secular ideas traveled this road, but never at sixty-five miles per hour. The van is kind, the van is good. She’s got new brake pads and an alignment. She’ll get us there.
    Asema, Age, and Gratitude
    The word for “tobacco” is asema, and it is essential to bring some for this reason: Spirits like tobacco. Their fondness for the stuff is a given of Ojibwe life. Tobacco offerings are made before every important request, to spirits or to other humans. Tobacco is put down by the root if you pick a plant, in the water when you visit a lake, by the side of the road when starting a journey. Tobacco is handed to anyone with whom you wish to speak in a serious manner. It is given for a story, or as an invitation to join someone in a teaching or writing project. Tobacco begins every noteworthy enterprise and is given as a thank-you at the end of every significant event. Perhaps spirits like tobaccobecause they like the fragrance of its smoke, or because people like tobacco and they appreciate thoughtfulness.
    My grandfather made the old-time kinnickinnick, red willow tobacco, a smoking mixture of shaved willow bark, sage, and other local herbs. Ojibwe people still use and make red willow tobacco, but the tobacco offered these days is most often bought in pipe shops or purchased in small foil packets. Sometimes I’m offered cigarettes to help with projects or to listen to someone’s problem. I quit smoking years ago. I began to cut down once I started running, for I soon realized that rolling a Bull Durham ciggie after a painful three-mile jog and puffing away to recover was counterproductive. So as I am now pure, I dismantle the cigarette, place the tobacco on the ground, then either bury or throw away the filter. My favorite tobacco comes from a pipe shop in Minneapolis and is called Nokomis, the Ojibwe word for grandmother. It is a rich, black, softly shredded moist stuff with a darkly sweet scent. Before I take a trip like the one I am taking now, I always buy a pound or two of this tobacco and divide it into smaller bags. Some are for the baby togive to other people, and some are for the spirits of the places we’re going to visit.

    There was a time when I wondered—do I really believe all of this? I’m half German. Rational! Does this make