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Net Charms in Cree and Ojibwe Language, Culture, and Worldview

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Net Charms in Cree and Ojibwe Language, Culture, and Worldview Net Charms in Cree and Ojibwe Language, Culture, and Worldview GEORGE FULFORD University of Winnipeg This paper is dedicated to my dear friend Cath Oberholtzer, who died on August 18, 2012.1 Her work provides a foundation for my own exploration of various threads of ethnographic, linguistic and arachnological evidence that together contribute to understanding the semiotic signicance of net charms (the precursors of dream catchers) in East Cree, Swampy Cree and Ojibwe language and culture.2 The metaphorical signicance of knots and string was a focus of much of Cath’s research. It occupied a chapter of her PhD thesis (1994), three articles (1993, 1995, 1996) and a recent book (2012). In all of these works Cath explored the symbolic, mythic, and material signicance of knots and string, most especially in the amulets suspended from cradle boards which she called net charms and which have entered the lexicon of popular North American culture as “dream catchers” but which are termed asabikeshiiwas- abiig ‘spider nets’ in Ojibwe (Baraga 1878:179; Wilson 1874:363; Lienke 1. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge Cath Oberholtzer’s important work on net charms, which continues to inspire me. Special thanks to Louis Bird for the wisdom and insight he shared in his telling of the Ahap story and so much more. Many thanks to Jennifer Brown, Chris Buddle, Dick Preston, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Kevin Brousseau, Mary Ann Corbiere, Charles Fiero, Bill Jancewicz, and Mark Ruml provided invaluable help in ascertaining the correct spelling and meaning of the words for “spider” and “spiderweb” in Ojibwe, East Cree, and Swampy Cree. Finally, thanks to Dana Sandu for her skillful rendering of net charms in several of the diagrams in this paper. 2. Expanding on Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) idea of an “invented tradition,” Cath stressed that contemporary dream catchers are a “reinvention” of more traditional net charms used by Cree and Ojibwe peoples to ward off various illnesses. The dream- catcher phenomenon, she speculated (2012:70), dates back no earlier than the 1960s while net charms likely have pre-contact origins. 67 68 GEORGE FULFORD 1977:121; Charles Fiero, personal communication) or simply ahnapiy ‘nets’ or ahaapiish ‘little nets’ in Swampy Cree and East Cree (Ellis 1995:445; Brousseau, personal communication).3 My paper is organized into ten sections. The rst discusses Cath Oberholtzer’s contributions to the study of Cree material culture. Follow- ing this, I examine the metaphorical importance of conjoinment and string, as expressed in the East Cree word for “knot” and “great grandparent,” which has cognates in Swampy Cree and Ojibwe. I explore how the root for ‘string’ also appears in East Cree, Swampy Cree, and Ojibwe words for spider webs, nets, and net charms. These schemas converge in Swampy Cree elder Louis Bird’s interpretation of an origin story about how Ahap the giant spider lowered the rst humans from the sky to the earth on a silken lament. The association of being lowered on a string and the act of being born is made explicit in Louis’s deeply poetic analysis of the story. Moving to Douglas Ellis’s analysis on a different version of the same story, I discuss the signicance of a formulaic ending used in such stories. This ending likens narrative episodes to lengths of string. A discussion of the animacy of the East Cree, Swampy Cree, and Ojibwe words for “nets,” “knots,” and “string” follows. I then examine how the structure of two kinds of orb-weaving spider webs is replicated in the form of net charms documented in various museum collections. Following this, I discuss how the moss bags in which Crees and Ojibwes traditionally tie their babies are symbolically like spider egg sacs, and associate the “ballooning” behavior of spiders to the symbolic importance of string in the Ahap story. I conclude by attempting to draw these diverse lines of thinking together to develop a general statement about Cree and Ojibwe language, culture, and worldview. 3. Ojibwe words in this paper are transcribed using Nichols and Nyholm’s (1995) orthography. The southern coastal dialect of East Cree is used in this paper and is tran- scribed from Junker et al. (2012). Swampy Cree words are based on Ellis (1995) with two notable exceptions. Long vowels marked by Ellis using the circumex have been transcribed using double vowels. Since /e/ is only long in Swampy Cree it is marked by a single character. Second, where Ellis uses /c/ to mark alveopalatal affricates, I have used the symbols ߧchߨ This has been done to eliminate the use of diacritics and provide a degree of consistency in the transcription of Ojibwe, East Cree and Swampy Cree words. It should be noted that Ellis’s lexicon is based mainly on Moose Cree and that /n/ is substituted for /l/ to render most Swampy Cree words from Moose Cree. NET CHARMS IN CREE AND OJIBWE LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND WORLDVIEW 69 CATH OBERHOLTZER’S ETHNOGRAPHIC AND MUSEUM RESEARCH Cath comprehensively documented East Cree artifacts in North American and European museums. Inuenced by exhibitions involving collaboration between museums and First Nations communities, she felt a responsibility to include ethnographic eldwork in her museum research. Her goal was to involve First Nations people in interpreting the artifacts she was document- ing. The importance of this practice is widely understood today, but in the 1990s, when Cath was doing the bulk of her research, it was not. Cath visited various communities on the east and west coasts of James Bay to glean Cree people’s insights into the artifacts she photographed. She documented (1995:195–6, 1996:66, 2012:43) how, when showing women from these communities images of dream catcher-style net charms from museum collections, she received quite different responses depending on where they were from. East Cree women from the upper east coast of James Bay (from Eastmain north) said they did not traditionally use such net charms. Instead they used a knotted thread or tiny shnet called nituchikan4 which may have been used to prevent a baby’s spirit from wandering too far from its body. Cath speculates (1995:202) that knotted strings were symbolically associated with game trails (the knots representing an animal’s footprints and the string representing its path in the snow). She says this symbolism is also attached to the cord used by hunters to drag beavers and other small game. This cord is known in East Cree as niimaapaan ‘my string’. East Cree women on the lower east coast of James Bay, like Swampy Crees on the west coast of James Bay and Ojibwes from the upper Great Lakes area to their south, told Cath that they traditionally used spider-web style net charms to protect their babies. They did not use knotted thread or shnet-style amulets for this purpose. These observations are borne out by Cath’s reading of the ethnographic literature on the subject, as well as by artifacts in museum collections (Oberholtzer 1995:195). A similar 4. Cath (2012: 43) transcribes this word as natutshikan, but this spelling seems idio- syncratic (no entry for this term can be found in the online East Cree dictionary (Junker et al. 2012). In the south coastal dialect of East Cree entries do appear in the dictionary for words with the root naata- meaning ‘to fetch’ and nitu- meaning ‘to heal or cure’. While either root could be used for the protective amulets Cath discusses, the most likely term for them is nituchikan ‘curing device’, which I use throughout this paper. 70 GEORGE FULFORD o bservation about the distribution of shnet and spider-web styles of net charms is made by Kevin Brousseau (personal communication). THE IDEA OF CONJOINMENT In both her PhD dissertation (1994:191) and her recent book (2012:56), Cath quoted Frank Speck (1935:245) who, quoting an East Cree phrase, wrote that “from great grandparents to great-grandchildren we are only knots on a string.” Regrettably, Speck does not provide the original wording in East Cree. However, it is clear that this statement is based on the East Cree stem aaniskutaapaan which is used in the words for ‘a knot’, ‘great grandparent’, and ‘great grandchild’ (Junker et al. 2012). The correspondence of meanings in these three East Cree words is linked to the twin ideas of “conjoinment” (expressed by the root aanisku-) and the action of “pulling” (expressed by the stem -taapaan). Taken together, the roots in this word represent the action of making a knot by pulling together and conjoining the ends of a length of string.5 This idea is metaphorically extended to encompass great grandparents and great grandchildren as symbolic “knots” marking the maximal span of conjoinment between living relatives. This in turn evokes the ideas of generational continuity and the umbilical cord which literally and metaphorically enables this. THE AHAP STORY In her dissertation Cath noted the resemblance of net charms to spider webs. She briey discussed the prominence given to spider silk in a version of the Swampy Cree story of Ahap (1995:200). Longer versions of this story, told by Simeon Scott, were recorded by Ellis (1989:5–10; 1995:2–13). Louis Bird (2002) tells an abbreviated version, and also provides an extensive commentary on its meaning. Louis’s story, which corresponds closely to Mr. Scott’s, describes the descent of the rst humans on a silken thread from a place in the sky to the earth. They are lowered to earth by a giant spider referred to alternately as Ehep or Ahap.6 5.
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