Tribal Histories

St. Croix Ojibwe History

– I’ve been able to collect a lot of photographs of our people, and once in a while I would bring them out into the center and the elders would come and sit and they’d look at those photos and they’d reminisce. And the sparkle is what I would see. The joy in looking at those old pictures and remembering how it used to be. I always like to see that. It was a happy time. A lot of it was happy times for them, but then there were also sadness too. I always kind of seen our tribe as being what I jokingly call the low man on the totem pole because other tribes have so many things going for them, and our tribe always kind of seems to be last. But we are trying very hard to retain the things and the gifts that were given to us by the creator.

[birds chirping]

– Versus Ojibwe.

– Oh yeah?

– My name is Wanda McFaggen. My Indian name is Biidaaban Ikwe, and that translates to Daybreak Woman. I come from the Sand Lake community of St. Croix. [speaking Ojibwe] My community. I’m from the [speaking Ojibwe] clan.

– My name is Mitchell LaSarge, and that’s my government name.

[speaking Ojibwe] Ojibwe [speaking Ojibwe]. I come from the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin band. And I work under the education department as a culture coordinator. And my traditional name is [speaking Ojibwe]. That was given to me when I was still a child. I can’t recall having a ceremony, but we don’t decide them, you know? It’s the manidoo, the spirits, that give us these names. And what mine roughly translates into is Man in the Woods, Wilderness Man, and that’s a spirit. It’s a manidoo that we pray to. He’s the keeper of this land we have. He watches over the land, the woods. When I’m among my people, I always tell my name, who I am. That’s how I recognize myself. We encourage our people that have these names, not just the government names, because that’s how the spirits recognize who we are, and we become closer with the spirits for help. They help us in many ways. I always bring up my name, you know, when I put my [speaking Ojibwe]. I never say my English name.

– We migrated from the east coast. The prophets told us that we had to move west, that there was a light-skinned race that was coming and if we didn’t move, we could potentially be destroyed. And the prophets told us that we needed to follow the [speaking Ojibwe] until we found food that grows on water, and that’s wild rice. So we began our migration, and it took many years. There’s seven stopping places along the migration root where the [speaking Ojibwe] set down and we did our [speaking Ojibwe]. Our last stop was on Madeline Island, and that we consider to be the spiritual hub of the Anishinaabe. From there, one of our Marten Clans started to leave Madeline Island and head down towards the St. Croix River. We had settlements on Rice Lake in Danbury. Some settlements down on Lac Wisconsin, our Round Lake community.

– The Marten Clan, we hold that clan here. You see, St. Croix is on the border of Ojibwe country and the Sioux people. And at a time it was said we were called the border sitters because, you know, we were on the edge of our country, you know? The Ojibwe and any further was the Sioux people. It was kind of a, maybe a warrior mentality that we watched for them to come into our country because Marten is said to be a strategic and warrior clan.

– When the treaties began, the 1837 treaty, we had a distinct identity. There were three chiefs that signed that treaty. And with treaty of 1842, some of the same chiefs signed that treaty too. With the treaty of 1854, we lost our identity in the eyes of the government. They said that none of our chiefs were at that treaty-making and none of them signed the treaty. But we’ve done a lot of research, and we’ve come to find that our chief [speaking Ojibwe], Little Buck, signed that treaty, but he signed it under the Lac Courte Oreilles band. So because of that we lost our identity as being St. Croix. And it took about 70 years for us to establish our homeland. Our people went to a lot of senate committee hearings and voiced about our land here. So eventually the government started to listen to us, and we got our recognition in 1934 with the Indian Reorganization Act. And we, our band name then became the St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. We chose to use Chippewa because of our dealings with the US government. That was the name that was designated to us. Although we were, in our own way, we call ourselves Anishinaabe. But in dealing with the different tribes a long time ago, we were known as Ojibwe because of the style of moccasins we wore. Our moccasins were pucker-toed, and that’s what other tribes called us by was the Ojibwe.

– My family’s always been here, St. Croix. During my mother’s birth, she was born in [speaking Ojibwe], Chicago, Illinois. That’s when all the Indians were moved to cities and stuff to try, you know, they were promised things, jobs. Good things like that. So my mother was born there, and throughout that time we’d always, my grandmother would always bring them back here to our reservation where we came from. Some of the younger ones, like my mother and her cousins from their age, it was very different because in the city there’s water. There’s everything there for them. But coming back up here to the reservations it wasn’t like that, you know? We had to go down to the lake for water, and we had our water pumps. We had to work much harder, but they’re reminded of who they are and why we do these things.

– I tried very desperately to learn my tradition because I grew up in Chicago, and my mother would bring us up here during the summertime. But we didn’t stay long enough to learn a lot of traditional things until we moved back here. And then I just sought out people that would be able to help me.

– My grandmother, she was very traditional. And since I was a baby I remember her being traditional. Throughout my high school years, I kind of veered off track of our traditions. Other things came into play. You know, going into a white school, off the reservation. Sports. You know, girls, all that stuff, you know, came into play The further I got from my traditions and our ceremonies and way of life, it seemed to get worse. It took me a long time to understand that. I was a very hard-headed person. And my grandmother, she was someone that always encouraged me to remember who we are, and I think the way she went about it helped me a lot because eventually I did start remembering who I was and what I’m supposed to do as a person, as an Anishinaabe person. I started out by going back to our big drums.

– We rely on our elders quite a bit. They’re the ones that hold our past for us. They’re the ones that are the keepers of our traditions, the keepers of our way. My mentor, Benny Rogers, he’s passed away, and I miss him. He– He would tell me a lot of different things that, traditional things that the people used to do a long time ago, and kind of reflected on how things have changed and that a lot of our young people are walking away from the traditions and the values. And, in my position for the tribe, I consider myself to be the middle man. I’ve learned a lot of things from the elders, and it’s my responsibility to pass that onto the children.

– These past five years or so, a lot of elders have passed that knew songs, knew the language, and, at the same time, among our young people, they’ve been lost sort of. They release into drugs and alcohol. It’s been running pretty rampant on our reservation. Overdoses are going crazy. That’s a topic we’ve been talking about a lot is these younger people and their troubles. How we can kind of stop it and guide them on their path, find what their passionate about. There’s the AODA department recovery program that I worked with also, and they wanted me to be there because I’m still young, somewhat. They think I can relate to a lot of younger generations coming up. They want the younger generations to see that you don’t need to be an elder to know these things and do these things. I can recall some things that push me towards our traditional ways. One was my grandmother. She got pretty sick, and whenever someone’s sick we usually have feasts and pray for them. It scared me. But during the times of them feasts, you know, we’d be smiling. It’s a community effort. And it made me feel good afterward. Lightened my heart. And every time I feel rejuvenated from ceremonies. And then she got better. She got better and she, some years went by and I eventually got put on the Big Drum as a member. And my grandmother would always tell me that’s the best thing you could do for your people.

– We are a Big Drum society, and that drum was given to us by the Sioux people, the Lakota people. And it traveled all through this area, and they say that how that drum came to be was because soldiers were killing the Lakota people and a lady went into the water and hid from the soldiers. And while she was there, the spirits talked to her and told her how to make this peace drum. We’re told that as long as that drum sounds that we will live in peace. We have that for our spirituality. We also have the Midewiwin lodge. I’m second degree mide. There’s not too much I can say about that. I can share with my family what goes on with Midewiwin, but that’s all.

– That’s how our ceremonies work, you know? We keep them secret And I’m always weary about how to speak on our ceremonies. You know, it’s a sacred thing, it’s a spiritual thing, so some things we can’t talk about. A lot of things we can’t talk about. So I only go so in depth about them. I don’t want something to happen to me because of it.

– We’re taught that we always are supposed to carry our tobacco. And when we see an eagle, we can put our tobacco down, we can pray for good things. We can pray for the ones that are suffering in our family. And the eagle will take those prayers up to the creator for us because he’s the only one that can go up that high. So we’re told that he’s our messenger. And any time we see an eagle, we put our tobacco down. Any time we gather anything, we put our tobacco down. Anything that we take from aki, Mother Earth here, we are supposed to offer our tobacco.

– At times, it feels like a heavy load. But that’s when I pray, you know? I put my tobacco down and it helps a lot. A lot of ways are forgotten. People forget these things, how ceremonies go because they don’t go enough or they really don’t go at all. See, when we’re at our Big Drum, there’s a speaker that prays for everyone there. And when we’re there, you know, them spirits are with us. The drum is spread out across a lot of Ojibwe bands. One thing I want to do is go to other drums, and I have been doing that. And it was a great time, you know? It was a great experience the first time I went beyond my own community drum. And it opened my eyes to how much other people want to carry on these things. When I travel to these other drums, you know, I can help sit at that drum, sing, gain knowledge in these legends because through ceremonies, they say, there’s elders or people there that know things. You should say them, you know, these legends of our people. And through that they get passed down in a sacred way and a respectful way. Through my job I want to help navigate some of these younger ones with troubles to our ceremonies. I want them to understand that it can help them throughout their whole life.

– I don’t think I’ve ever attended a feast or a ceremonial gathering that, you always see rice. People bring rice all the time. When you hurt the environment, you also hurt the Earth. And our people have always relied on the Earth for our food, for our medicines, everything. This lake here is a good example of that. It used to be abundant with wild rice. My family riced this lake all the time. But I’m not quite sure who thought of the idea to put carp in this lake to combat another invasive species of this lake. And the carp overran the lake and damaged all of the rice. So the rice is all gone here. My cousin and I became very concerned about our rice here. And so we went from tribe to tribe with tobacco and gifts. We started at Mille Lacs. We went to Fond du Lac, and just kind of made a big circle. And we went and talked to all of the spiritual people. We didn’t know some of them, but we would go in the community and ask who the spiritual people were. So we talked with all of them, and we asked them to come. You know, come and hold lodge with us here. Come and help us. Pray for our rice. So they came. We held lodge for four years in a row. You know, they would come all the time and help us pray. We would sing, we would feast and dance and it was a good thing. We used that part but we also used the western part because our EPA department, during that same time, was working with the county here to remove a lot of the carp. During that time too, our EPA was reseeding the lake. So we have 80 acres of wild rice that’s flourishing. With our prays to the creator, we believe that this lake in the future will hold rice again for our people. Rice, to us, is a very special gift from the creator.

– I wanted to know who I was, you know? I wanted to know my identity. And a lot of people, I think, have trouble now days with psychological issues because they don’t know who they are. I have a sister and one of her sons is getting a little bit older. Seven or so maybe. And we bring him to the Big Drums. We bring him to these water feasts, blueberry feasts. When I was growing up, my mother took care of us, I really didn’t have a prominent male role figure to show me these things, tell me who I was as a young man growing up, what my responsibility was. So I think that also had a part in my identity, my crisis when I was a young teenage acting out sort of. And that’s why I want to try so hard to gain what I can for my nephew and my nieces. I want him to know who he is. I want him to help other people and carry on these things because if he doesn’t, who will? Papers? Documents? I want him to understand why we do these things. He’s very perceptive toward it. He really likes it, and I’m glad he does, you know? Because I can see how, with me being there as his uncle, he has someone to look up to. He sees the importance of it, and he told me he wanted to grow up to drum like me. That made me really happy.