Tribal Histories

Mole Lake Ojibwe History

– [speaking Ojibwemowin to Gitchie Manitou] When I do that, then I call in all them spirits from the air, from the stars, from the day and the night, the light and dark. All these things that Creator has created for all these human beings here. When they know I’m going to do this, then they wait for the command. I go to waabanong, and I say, panesi miigwech. Then I go to zhaawanong, the south. Zhawendaagozi for new life. Say miigwech. Then I take it over to the west, ningaabii. Ningaabii’anong for the life after we live here on Earth. Miigwech for the ancestors. I take it to the north and say miigwech giiwedin, Anamikaw for our medicine and our health here on Earth. Aho. Miigwech. I offer this asemaa, this bawaagan, to Omaamaa aki who gives us our life and our living here on Earth. Miigwech Omaamaa aki.

I point it up to the moon for my grandmother, Nookomis.

I thank her for bringing Anishinaabe here to Earth and bringing our life here on Earth to do our job here for my grandmother, Nookomis. Say miigwech to the moon and the stars. With that, I light this pipe for all these directions.

– Mole Lake History was funded in part by: Irene Daniell Kress, Francis A. and Georgia F. Ariens Fund of the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, Evjue Foundation, Ron and Patty Anderson, Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, Timothy William Trout Education Fund, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

– [Speaking Ojibwemowin] My name is Fred Ackley. That’s my English name. My Anishinaabe anjinikaazh is Makoons. That means little bear or cub bear. It was given to me by my grandfather, Charles Ackley.

His Indian name, anjinikaazh, was Azaadi. It means popple tree. He was a member of Midewiwin Society for the Anishinaabe people. He was a powerful gozaakiid, or shaman.

I lit the sage before and I’m going to light this sweetgrass for us.

What the sage does is– We believe that it politely asks the negative energy to leave for a little while so we can talk a little bit and not to come and mess with our hearts and our minds.

So when we leave here, maybe we can have one kind of thought of what happened here today. With this little bit of sweetgrass, though, it goes for everything on Earth. It represents what we just talked about. It’s our sacrifice to the Creator today for what we’re doing. And I thank Him for giving us these things today.

With that, I’ll go to somewhat of our history for the people here I’m talking about. Where we’re sitting at right here today is what they call “Rice Lake” in English. It’s Manoomin zaaga’igan, or the rice lake, that’s what our people call it in Ojibwemowin, the language. This lake here’s been feeding Native people for thousands of years. It was carbon dated back in the late ’70s and ’80s from the rice they took off the stalk that year from the DNR and the UW people as 2,000 years old. So down here, if you look down below, it’s maybe 100, 90 feet down in that muck out there. It’s packed with wild rice seeds, and they come up every year, one at a time, and they stay down there for I don’t know how long. And that’s why this comes back every year.

Now, the reason why we live here on this lake is because in the old days Indian people didn’t have a lot of food, so we had to live off the land and whenever the lake would give up the food, we’d come here and pick this rice and then parch it and prepare it for winter and eat it all year round. So this is why we live here now and why we came here later on in our history. Through the known history since the European people had came in settlement here, we’ve been living in an area called Madeline Island up on Lake Superior. We started our journey, they say, from the east coast all the way down the St. Lawrence, the different stops through time until they got to the place where food grows on the water. And that’s right here. This lake. This is where the food grows on the water, the manoomin. So, through that time frame, years of travel and migration, we finally end up back here in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Madeline Island.

People lived there on Madeline Island for a long, long time, under one chief and a government, an old ancient Indian government, the Anishinaabe. And it got time where the island was getting too crowded.

So the medicine men, the gozaakiid men, they looked to the spirit world and they asked what the Indians should do. And what it came to the Indian people through the gozaakii that they would move off the island into the inland where there were places where there was more bountiful food for the Indians to eat and live.

What we felt was taking our homeland back, we were just taking back where years ago when there was a great war that the Indian people had amongst ourselves. We were forced as refugees to the east coast, and then now we’re back here. We were told to come back here. So all these thousand, maybe a thousand, 1,500 years, we lived in peace and harmony with the people on Madeline Island. Until one chief was born and he was a great chief, great war chief and a leader for the Ojibwe. He had a daughter he loved a lot, and a great love and respect other people had for that woman, his daughter, because she was the daughter of the chief.

Well, she got married and she married a member of the Marten Clan, the waabizheshi. And he was one of the war chiefs, a general I guess, commander. He was a great warrior. Well, his daughter and his son-in-law, they had a set of twins. Twin boys. They were the first born, so they were going to be the next in line to the throne for the chieftainship.

In them days, the law said that Indian people, only one of them twins could live. The other one had to be taken at birth. And the chief, he loved his daughter so much and he seen the baby twins, in his heart he couldn’t. He couldn’t come to keeping the law. So he had the Marten son-in-law take one of the babies down here to the interior, and our journey came this way to live down here. He kept the other son up on Bad River, up by Madeline Island and Red Cliff. And his name was Waubojeeg. And the son that came down here by Mole Lake, Sokaogoning, his name was Waabizheshi. A white fisher looks like a marten. That’s how they got their names, the twin boys.

Six miles southeast from right here, this lake here, was the lake over there called “Post Lake” in English. Here, the tribe here that we call ourselves, our name, is Sokaogoning, or Post Lake People, or People of the Post in the Lake.

At the time with the narrows over there, there’s a widening of the Wolf River and it causes this lake to be formed. But in the middle of that lake when it was formed thousands, whatever, when the ice left or whatever happened, they left a petrified tree there, a post. Now, on top of that post, whatever happened, when the sun would be like at a certain time on a certain day, our people would gather there for Midewiwin ceremonies. We’d have feast and prayers and we’d wait for that post, for that light to shine off that post. That was supposed to be for healing, good luck, for the future, that God was still blessing the Indian people. He was showing us that by building all our mounds he received our prayers and our thoughts. So we prayed there all the time. I come from the Mundua. They were the ancient Anishinaabe people way back, where people now days wonder who built these mounds and why.

When we built those mounds, our people had a smile on their face every day. We were all happy.

Somebody would be fishing. Somebody would be hunting deer. And somebody would be over there working on dirt, digging up dirt, carrying dirt. Everybody would be working. And there would be a few people laying there sleeping all day. Strange people would walk into the village and say, “I see everybody working here. “How come those people aren’t? “They get to sleep every day. “They don’t do nothing. “You feed them, you help them out every day.” You know? And the Indians said, “Well, when we’re doing all this during the day, those people are up all night telling us what to do the next day.” See, and that’s where the observation and sharing, the night and day with the Indian people. They call them people waabanos.

They watch the morning star. They knew exactly what time of the year things were going to change and move. They even knew what time of the year we were in the whole vast universe spinning way out for thousands of years until we got back over here. All these different things they’re finding out now we knew about. Why? Because we didn’t forget. Today, this is the memory that’s coming back.

Down south of here, war came to the Indian people. These women were harvesting the rice and these Lakota warriors were coming around looking for scalps. And they see the women and children with the rice, so they took their scalps, killed women and children, and had a scalp dance on the women and children. So when the news got all the way up here and all around the warriors, we all got a big party and we went and got them. So then my understanding was down by Mystic Lake over there, that Lakota tribe came back up here with more warriors and they were going to take us back because these guys went home and they lied about that. They said, “No, we didn’t kill no women and children.” They said, “We just attacked them.” They lied. So all these guys come up here on a lie. And that’s where they died here on the lie. Five hundred guys died here. All my warriors got out these holes and waited for them to get in here, and once they got here, they’re all dead. They didn’t go nowhere. We had this whole lake with foxholes around this whole lake. It was a lot bigger then, but you can still see them all the way through here on the shoreline. We call foxholes, but we dug, pulled the weeds over like that. They’d never know you were there. When they got here, they never seen their families down in Mystic Lake no more.

We lived here for a lot of years, living off the land or with the land. So long that the water and the air, we’re part of that. And all that, what you see around me, is part of me.

The first chief here was Gimiwana’am. English name Rainy. They called him Rainy. The day was a rainy day when he was born. The next one was Gichi-waabizheshi or the Big Marten. And Gichi-migizi, the Great Eagle, was his son. Gichi-migizi’s son was Waabizheshi, or the White Eagle. And he lived here for a long time. 80-100 years old. And he went down to a man, my great-great uncle, grandfather named Ed Ackley. And his Indian name was Misaabe, or the Giant. And for him, he was the brother to my grandfather Dewitt. And his name is Gigiaashe, the sound of the wind in the tree and the grass, the wind when you hear the grass.

From him came another chief. His name was Wambash, or John Seymour they called him. When the Indian agent came to the pay station, they asked him his name and he couldn’t understand the translation so they gave him the last name Seymour because that’s what the translator said. Wambash, that man can see more. So that’s why he got that name. So it came all the way down to under him and a few other smaller, they called the chief line, Ngig. And Oshkaabewis, he was a waiter. He was a Wisconsin River chief. And they all gathered together at Sokaogoning. So all these are why we’re here. All the other tribes have their genealogy, like I just said, about their chiefs and their families who led their people through all these years. And the ones I said here were separate chiefs and separate people, but all the other tribes in Ojibwe country, they all knew these people like relatives because we were. What they called the hierarchy of the Ojibwe government and the way we lived. I carry that genealogy in my mind because my grandmother told me to do it. Now, the story I just told you was handed to me by her, Alice Ackley. And her name was Waawiye-giizhigokwe, the Sky All Around the World. And her daughter was my mother. And her name was Manoomin-ikwe, the Manoomin Woman. She made the manoomin. So that was my mother’s name. Now I’m here now at this time of history and for the tribe as Makoons. Now, I’m not the ogimaa or the chief here, but I’m a member of that family, the higher elite family of the old Ojibwe government before 1939.

See, we lived here all them years until 1939 as free Indians. While the other tribes around Lake Superior all made a treaty in 1854 with the US government, our people were there too.

We waited here, though, for that treaty and the reservation and the promises by the government to be fulfilled for us. Waiting for the patent and for the agent and the money and the farm equipment and the school which never came. Constantly our leadership and our family were writing letters back and forth to the government in Madison for Wisconsin and the government in Washington, DC, for the treaty, asking when we’re going to be fulfilled. When this road not too far up here– It’s called Old Military Road. That road was cut through here in the territory in 1869. The chief here at the time was named Gichi-migizi, or Great Eagle. He watched the road being built. He had his own warriors and other people working, supplying all these other guys building the road. So we were sitting here thinking it was going to be finally fulfilled, a reservation was going to be established and it never was. They made the road, and they made it into a mail route for the mining up in Copper Harbor, up in Michigan there, Lake Superior. And they just kept going back and forth like they’re doing today.

And that’s why in 1934 when the Howard-Wheeler bill was passed by Congress and the United States government, President and other people at the time decided it was time to try to keep the promise to some of the Indian tribes in the nation from the Homestead Act of 1887 which took all the Indian land and turned it into farmland. Well, through long investigations from like 1920, the agents came here to Mole Lake talking to the Indian people and other people, trying to figure out what they’re going to do with us. So when they got all the information, I guess they couldn’t deny it anymore. They had to do something. With what little bit of money that was left from the act and that from other tribes getting reservations, they finally got the Mole Lake people 1,800 acres around this lake here, Rice Lake. And our people are very happy about that. They were happy that finally they had a place where they could call their own. For over 80 years, these people waited and they were getting pushed around by all the lumber camps and all the settlers. Every time they would open up another part of the territory, they would kick the Indians off here. “You don’t live here. I own this now.” So we had to keep moving constantly around here, trying to stay at this lake every fall. And that’s the history, really, the true history of what my people have to go through here, through all these years, and then through what we do now, you know, Mole Lake, in this time frame where I’m at talking.

We have threats from outside, corporations and governments and other things, for mining and for timber.

There’s more land for everything, for the other society. So my job as a young man was to keep and take care of the land the best way I can with these prayers. Trying to get some sense out of how to keep things going when there’s a constantly modern world changing all the time. It’s a mind-blowing thing to try every day of your life to think, “How do you keep this wild, somewhat wild, “with a society that’s developing and using everything around you?” It’s a constant, constant thinking of how to do that.

Indian people, though, we have always this thought about the world going around some more. What comes around goes around.

That’s why we keep praying, a lot of us, the old people, to keep this all going around.

If we don’t stop it here, you know, people, their minds thinking about polluting your water hole and then trying to tell your kids to drink it. That kind of thought. You have to get away from that. Keep the water hole clean for your kids and forget about the money. One of our Indian teachings, because we get this food from the land and the Earth, when anybody comes by us or sees us, visits us, we always share that food with them, even if we only have a little bit, because it’s not ours. Even though we go out here in nature and pick it and harvest it ourselves, you know, and get tired and sweat, we know it’s not ours. We don’t own it. We don’t own the seeds. We don’t have that Indian patent on nothing. It’s only with the Creator and the Indian people that we have that.

Today, this is the memory that’s coming back.

That’s why when I talk this way, I’m talking from the Creator in a spiritual way. We do this for every day of our lives. I asked permission to come over here when I woke up this morning. I had good dreams. I had good feelings.

That’s why we do this. It’s always with the gratitude that the people before us gave us the spirit here in our way of life, our heritage, and our teachings to carry on when they were gone and gone to the other world. See, and then my job is to hand it down to somebody else, another generation. It keeps on going that way. Because if we stop, then the world’s going to stop. Simple. But you got to do it every day. You got to have faith that He’s going to make these plants turn green again. Right here, this grass turning green. The lake is going to come up. the rice is going to come up. That’s what this does. You give this to the Creator like he gave it to us to have peace. And then, with gratitude and respect, we ask Him like the birds do. We never plant nothing like that. We only ask Him to bring it out again for us. When I do this here for this story, I talk about my people’s story, I was told a long time ago that we got to start this way.

[music]

– To learn more about the sovereign Indian Nations in Wisconsin, visit WisconsinFirstNations.org. To purchase a DVD of this and other Tribal Histories programs, visit WPT.org or call 800-422-9707.- Mole Lake History was funded in part by: Irene Daniell Kress, Francis A. and Georgia F. Ariens Fund of the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, Evjue Foundation, Ron and Patty Anderson, Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, Timothy William Trout Education Fund, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.