Anishinaabe Doodem Pictographs: Narrative Inscriptions and Identities

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304336141 Anishinaabe Doodem Pictographs: Narrative Inscriptions and Identities Chapter · January 2016 CITATIONS READS 0 145 1 author: Cory Willmott Southern Illinois University Edwardsville 27 PUBLICATIONS 26 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Chinese Blue and White Cross-stitch View project Voices in Wood: Northwest Coast Carving View project All content following this page was uploaded by Cory Willmott on 23 June 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. 5 Anishinaabe doodem Pictographs: narrative inscriptions and identities Cory WiLLMoTT introduction A shaft of winter sunlight dazzled the snow-filled yard and cut through the double-glass doors, marking a path across the middle of the table, where it splashed diffused light onto the piles of coloured seed beads. On this industri- ous Sunday afternoon in January 1999, Diana Whiteduck and I were creating beaded eyeglass cases with animal motifs to be sold at the Toronto First Na- tions Day festival held annually in June. I designed the motifs for a beadwork class that I co-taught at the Native Women’s Resource Center in Toronto with Debbie MacDonald, a beadworker of Cree descent who grew up in Toronto. Diana, an Algonkin whose family roots in Ontario spread from Golden Lake through Mattawa to North Bay, was an especially accomplished beadworker who was well known for high-quality items such as moccasins and pipe bags. As Diana added row upon row of brown beads to fill in a bear paw motif, the conversation turned to her doodem,1 the Bear. Since the meaning of “doodem” is in large part what this chapter addresses, it is difficult to provide a concise definition at the outset. In the Anishinaabe language, it never appears without a possessive pronoun; however, rendered in English the convention is to use the singular “doodem” and the plural “doodemag” forms. Baraga (1878, 96, 314) describes it as “My Indian family mark.” Nichols and Nyholm (1995, 104) equate it with a “clan.” Bohaker’s (2013, 9) account is more akin to the nu- anced definition developed in this chapter: “Doodemag are a type of kinship expressed through relationship with specific other-than-human entities of the Great Lakes region.” long-brown.indd 130 2015-09-04 1:19 PM Diana Whiteduck (2000) explained that she first became aware of her doodem in the early 1980s when she had resigned herself to living a Euro- American way of life. At that time she experienced disturbing dreams in which fierce animals would chase and harass her. As she escaped their at- tacks, an animal would appear and tell her, “You have to come back to who you are.” Since she began following this advice, those frightening dreams have been replaced by ones in which she receives guidance from ancestral, animal, and other spirits. “To me,” she says, “the doodem and the guardian spirit are one and the same. To me, that’s the ancestors. These ancestors guide me in dreams.” She says that her doodem “has always been there,” guiding her to know “what’s right for me regardless of the teachings that I hear.” As well, her doodem protects her from harm. When she first came to the city, she was not accustomed to crossing streets. Her doodem stopped her from crossing if a car was coming. However, she did not know the particular identity of her doodem until a series of dreams, events, and an elder’s interpretations made it clear. In Diana’s experience, her doodem serves the dual purpose of spiritual guidance and social identity. The association of ancestors with doodemag is in keeping with their social function of distinguishing lineage groups. The merging of spiritual and social functions is made possible by the fact that ancestral spirits appear in dreams to offer spiritual guidance. Given this cultural logic, however, I was puzzled to learn later that Diana’s brother has a different doodem, which an elder conferred upon him at a naming ceremony. I partici- pated in several Anishinaabe2 naming ceremonies and also studied the ethno- graphic literature on them. When the puberty vision quest was mandatory for all males, and in some regions for females too, namers with visionary powers conferred sacred names that functioned as temporary powers that stood in for those one would later receive from guardian spirits during one’s puberty fast. At that time, sacred names from naming ceremonies and from vision quests were kept secret. They established a reciprocal bond between the giver and receiver of spiritual power (Silverstein 1992, 102–4). As acquired powers, both sacred names and guardian spirits were the exact opposite of doodemag, which were statuses ascribed at birth and publicly proclaimed. How could this apparent contradiction be reconciled? When I had this conversation with Diana Whiteduck, I had been immersed in the Toronto First Nations community for about seven years. I was well known as a beadworker and partner to Anishinaabe storyteller Alex (Zeek) Cywink and was lesser known as a student of anthropology. The community consisted of an urban core of Anishinaabeg (mainly Ojibwe, Odawa, Pota- watomi, and Algonkin), Crees (mainly from James Bay), and Haudenosaunee AniSHinAABE doodEM PiCTOGRAPHS 131 long-brown.indd 131 2015-09-04 1:19 PM (mainly from Six Nations and Oneida reserves). The majority of community members were from families stemming from Ontario First Nations reserves. A sizable portion, however, were from families that were enfranchised or never registered and that were therefore not recognized as “Indian” as defined in the Canadian Indian Act (Hawley 1984, 12–15).3 The urban community ebbed and flowed as its members travelled frequently between Toronto and Ontario reserve communities, as well as to more distant Canadian and Amer- ican First Nations territories. As Zeek Cywink’s partner, I too travelled these routes. As a doctoral student at McMaster University, I was also privileged to travel, with Zeek, much farther afield throughout Chippewa and Odawa communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota during the summers of 1997 and 1998. These personal experiences in both urban and reserve Anishinaabe communities in the United States and Canada left me with a deep impression of the importance of local and regional historical approaches. When I first met Dick Preston in 1995, I had just completed a master’s thesis based on four years of “radical participation” among Toronto First Nations beadworkers (Silverstein 1995; Turner 2003, 146–7). My thesis emphasized the intimate connection between artistic creation and narrative processes. It employed Preston’s (1975, 14–15, 30) methodology by taking an inductive approach to Anishinaabe narratives that involved participation in the “value- tones or experience qualities of the basic categories and notions.” I was thor- oughly immersed in both beadworking practices and spiritual beliefs. As I became more and more interested in the ways that Anishinaabe narratives interwove with artistic traditions (Silverstein 1995) and real life histories (Silverstein 1998, 363), Anishinaabe doodemag became a primary focus of my attention as the most “basic category” or “core” of Anishinaabe identity (Silverstein 2000a, 2000b). This chapter is a synthesis and elaboration of a chapter in my dissertation (Silverstein 2000a, 78–107) and two unpublished works on Anishinaabe doodem emblems that I wrote largely under the men- torship of Dick Preston (Silverstein 2000b; Willmott 2003). In 1998 I urged scholars to “allow the images embedded in Native narratives to ‘dialogue’ with their lives to at least the same extent as they do the concep- tual models of the academy” (Silverstein 1998, 363). In order to do this, one must shift orientation from English-language categories of narratives to the Anishinaabe categories of aadizookaan and dibaajimowin.4 When narratives are told in the Anishinaabe language, there are linguistic markers that distinguish aadizookaanag from dibaajimowinan (Spielmann 1998, 186–8). How- ever, I have relied mainly on English-language translations, partly because I have only introductory-level knowledge of the Anishinaabe language and partly because many of the earliest collections of narratives were published 132 CoRy wiLLMOTT long-brown.indd 132 2015-09-04 1:19 PM in English only. Without such linguistic cues, I distinguish between these two types of stories by (1) distance in time, (2) the key characters, and (3) the con- text of telling.5 Aadizookaanag refer to events that took place in the distant past, and they usually involve powerful beings whose identities are known to all Anishinaabeg. There is a taboo against telling aadizookaanag during the summer. Often men and women who were renowned for their storytelling prowess told these stories, but everyone learned them, and each household had its own storyteller. Dibaajimowinan are about events that took place within memory of the storyteller or of successive tellers of the story. They involve individuals widely known for their historical significance or locally known for their current presence in the community. Dibaajimowin stories of some historic depth may be told in similar contexts to those of aadizookaan stories but without restrictions on time of year. Indeed, stories about historic individuals who were renowned for their spiritual powers would eventually transform from dibaajimowin into aadizookaanag (Silverstein and Cywink 2000, 41). More commonly, however, dibaajimowin stories are told in every- day contexts, especially at the moment of meeting. While on visiting rounds in Ontario reserve communities during the 1990s, I found that my compe- tence in telling dibaajimowin stories upon arrival was the crucial factor in whether or not people would continue normal social interaction or alter it to accommodate an “outsider.”6 This chapter is concerned with both aadizookaan and dibaajimowin stories of doodemag in individual life histories in order to gain insight into the spiritual agency of doodemag in Anishinaabe identities.

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