PBS Wisconsin Documentaries

Ma'iingan: Brother Wolf

[waves lapping]

[wind howling]

[flute music]

– [Speaking Ojibwe] Boozhoo, ikwewag, ininiwag gaye. Mookaan-giizis nindizhnakaaz, migizi nindoodem. Mashkiziibi nindoon jibaa. Mideweninini nindaw.

– My Anishinaabe name is “Rising Sun.” It was given to me by a Bad River elder many years ago. I am Eagle Clan. I’m of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, and a member of the Grand Medicine Lodge, the Midewin. It’s good to be here with you today. I’ve been given asemaa, Indian tobacco, and asked to speak about our brother, Ma’iingan. Maybe I should start by talking about the creation. The Great Spirit came down to the earth, took dust, and took it back to Sky World. Breathed life into the dust of Mother Earth. Creating Anishinaabe, spontaneous or original man. And then Gichi Manidoo lowered Anishinaabe down to meet his mother. And so, the first steps that he ever took was out of love, and honor, and respect because the Earth was his mother. And so, it was the Great Spirit who sent a companion then to travel with Anishinaabe: Ma’iingan.

[flute music]

– Ma’iingan, Brother Wolf was funded in part by John and Carolyn Peterson Charitable Foundation. Bitzer Family Legacy Fund, Eleanor and Thomas Wildrick Family, Robert and Elke Hagge, National Endowment for the Humanities, Focus Funds for Wisconsin Programming, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

[flute music]

– Thomas Howes: Biidaasige indigo. Migizi indoodem. Mii omaa Bapashkominitigong indoonjibaa Mii imaa Nagaajiwawaang indaa noongom. My name is Thomas Howes. I’m Eagle Clan. I’m the Natural Resources Manager for the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

– Good morning, Tom.

– Good morning, Linda. There’s only so much of some traditional philosophies that are for public and for recording. And the old man that taught me this is from Red Lake. I said, “Is this okay? Can I say this much?” And he said, “Yeah.” All of creation was being made in pairs, so that they could perpetuate themselves and they all had partners, and so, the birds and the deer and so on. And that original man was lonely, and so Creator kind of took pity on him. Says, “Well, I’ll send someone. I’ve got work for you, “but I’m going to send someone to keep you company.” And that was Ma’iingan. And they gave him instructions to walk the earth, to name everything, to describe everything. And Ma’iingan didn’t know what to think about this, and neither did this man and they said, “Well, this is what Creator wanted.”

[ice cracking]

During that journey, the human, he decided to go across this frozen river. And when he crossed that frozen river he broke through and he was going to drown, couldn’t get out. And he asked Ma’iingan for help, and Ma’iingan wasn’t sure. He looked at him, and he says, “Well, I don’t really owe you anything.” But then, he remembered what Creator told him, “You guys walk together.” And so, he pulled, and helped the man get out of that river. In traditional Ojibwe philosophy, everything is an exchange. If people do things for you, you owe them. If a plant does something for you, you owe that plant. And so, in those times of need when someone helps, some people call it ezhibizhinikenig. Man decided that he really had a life debt, is a way to look at it, with that wolf. And from there, that’s where they continued that walk around Creation, and really grew close because of that. That feeling that, “Well, you saved my life, and I forever love you.” That’s the way I understand that part of the story as to why there’s such a bond.

– I’m Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings I am the Director of Public Information here at Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, as well as an elected tribal council official for the Bad River Band. Ma’iingan is a very delicate subject to talk about in our community because Ma’iingan is equivalent to “our brother, our relative.” In our language we talk about Nind inawemaagan idog or all of our relations, our relatives, and Ma’iingan is one of those that we have a really, really tight-knit relationship with. And our struggle as Anishinaabe people is always the same thing: to get others to understand what that relationship is and why it is important to us. And so, here, you know, you grow up thinking that everybody knows about Ma’iingan and how important and sacred Ma’iingan is, and then you meet a lot of other people that really could care less and have no idea. It’s kind of tough to reconcile that. I think that’s why I’ve worked so hard my entire life so far to try and educate people in a friendly and compassionate way to kind of reach out the hand and invite people to our community. You know, invite people to our area to see some of the things that we do, to see how we lives our lives, to see how we acknowledge this relationship of reciprocity that we maintain with everything in creation.

– This one’s finished. This was sitting in the closet.

[speaking Ojibwe]

Nanabozho and Winona. My mother and my Aunt Teresa, they were artists, and my Uncle Fred and Uncle John were artists. My brother was too, but he gave it up young. You can smell the oil. I grew up around it, my mother was always painting so, I just… I don’t know, as a teenager I just started, you know, 14. I was always drawing, though, cartoons and stuff. Well, there’s stories out there. My mother told me a couple with Nanabozho. Those were my first stories. I’ve dreamt a lot of paintings. I haven’t had a dream in a while, but that’s where the blue hair came from. They were underwater and they were all blue, all the manidoo spirits. That’s all that was there, and they’re always the same ones. The four winds. The Gichi Manidoo has always got a lot of hair, so this guy is just wrapped in hair in these dreams. Here I was younger doing, copying all this Greek mythology and digging the satyrs and the centaurs and all that stuff, and especially the satyrs you know, like Pan and stuff, and it just crossed over. That’s just amazing. It’s like it was waiting to come, you know? And I said, “Well, there it is.” Here I was trying to do Greek mythology, and I can do my own, Anishinaabe. ‘Cause I got a lot of stories, but I don’t– Takes so long to do these. If I really worked at it, I could do three paintings in a year, big paintings. You know, when everything comes together for all people, not just Native people. We’ll see.

– Jeremy St. Arnold: This video here… This is certainly one of our best videos. This is the only video at the time where we had all eight members of the pack in the same frame, and you can see some of them are off on the right-hand side here, but one of the unique things is the collared female– There was only one part of this whole morning– They were outside in front of the camera for four hours that morning, and all of her yearling pups and the other adult members of the pack circled in front of the camera, but she kept avoiding the camera. So, we’re wondering if she knows it’s there, if she knows something isn’t quite right. That’s one of the exciting parts about doing this is trying to come up with questions and then trying to figure out how to answer them. My name’s Jeremy St. Arnold. I’m the Assistant Wildlife and Forestry Biologist for Red Cliff. Our wolf research right now, initially, is just monitoring. We’re doing trail camera work. We’re also doing tracking. We’re doing road surveys in the wintertime and doing some howling surveys in the summertime and we’re interested in looking at their pack dynamics, their prey selection, their habitat selection. We’re also interested in kill sites and den sites. I know that the pack is as big as it’s ever been, as far as what the DNR knows and since I’ve been here. The origin of the pack, as best we know, was around 2002 with two wolves. And it’s kind of gone up and down, but right now it is at a peak of 13 wolves, with eight adults and there are five pups, and we verified those visually. We’re going out, we’re going to set up some cameras, and we’re looking for the den site and we’re tracking this female. And we keep getting a good solid ping from her and then it’ll disappear, and we’re assuming she’s going down into her den, and that’s why she’s fading in and out, and so we’re using that in combination with coordinates we had from the previous month before that when she was setting up the den and getting ready to deliver. And, finally, after four hours, we’re thinking, “All right, we’re just going to set up some cameras on these trails. We’re not going to find the den today. We don’t want to stress her too much. We don’t want to harass her.”

And then, all of a sudden, Ron, the wildlife technician for Red Cliff, he says, “What’s that that’s coming out from under the tree?” And we look, and out from under this hemlock tree comes a wolf pup. But at first, you couldn’t tell. It just kind of looked like something waddling. And once we saw it was a wolf pup, first instinct for me, which apparently is not normal, was to just run and grab the pup. We had a plan to eventually get our hands on the pups and we wanted to PIT tag them, look over their general condition, get an idea of how many males and females, whether they had any parasites or anything like that. I brought it back to Ron. We were checking it over, and then we noticed there’s four more pups that came out from under this tree. So, we ended up catching one male and one female, and they were in fantastic condition. They didn’t have any parasites, no ticks, no fleas, nothing of that nature. They were as clean and healthy as any pup that you’re going to find at somebody’s house. So, we were really excited to see that. And when we released them, we noticed that Mom circled back around and we’re assuming she reclaimed them because she came so quickly to that area. So, those myths that you hear about parents wanting to abandon their young… They put way too much time and effort and energy and just their life into this to just give up like that. But that was certainly the best day we’ve had so far in any of our wolf activities. That one kind of made it all worthwhile.

– Our people have a lot of important traditional ecological knowledge that stems from thousands of years of observation within our ancestral homelands. Today, when a scientist comes up with some study and provides empirical data, people really have a hard time questioning that because it’s science, right? This traditional ecological knowledge that our people maintain is what scientists call “phenology” nowadays. It’s data. It’s also observation. And it’s exactly what scientists do, as well. It just dates back even further than what modern day scientists work with. So, when you talk about traditional ecological knowledge, a scientist goes, “Oh, okay, yes, I know what that is,” but to us it’s Anishinaabe-izhitwaawin, our teachings, our way of life.

– That’s a coyote in the one. It’s a deer. There’s a bear. You can see its nose. I don’t know if anybody wants to peek at it. You can see the bear came up and sniffed the camera. He’s got his eyeball in it on that one. Bears really like to come and investigate our cameras. And they… If I accidentally have any scent from the beaver on there they will really sniff at it, and they will rub it on themselves. Anytime we have– I first started setting up trail cameras in June 2014. We initially, for the first six months, had tremendous luck. We were getting as many photos as we could possibly want. And then, as luck would have it, as soon as I switched over to the cameras that have video, which I was very excited about, I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be easy. We’ll get all these wolf videos.” We had two years where we didn’t have wolves show up on camera. We knew they were there, we saw their sign, and they just kept eluding me. Part of it is, when we first started using the cameras that had video, they were using white flash and it never occurred to me that white flash was going to be limiting in terms of trying to get wolf footage, but it turns out that of all the species out there, they have shown the most sensitivity to that white light. The coyotes don’t seem to shy away from it for very long. Marten will go right up into the flash. Deer don’t seem to be very phased by it. Bears aren’t phased by it. But wolves, they kind of just freak out. You will not get activity at that camera from wolves, but one of the cameras that has a covert IR or a black flash? They will show up at that camera. So, we just were persistent, we kept at it, and we started getting all kinds of wolf videos. We have hours and hours now of not just photo slideshows, but videos as well, and I’ve had people come up and express gratitude for the fact that there are the videos on YouTube now because now they can share that with people and say, “Hey, look at this amazing thing that Red Cliff has “and look at all the wildlife that we have, “and we have this amazing species “that we thought was gone, and they’re back, and now we can try to keep them here.” It’s been very positive. I’ve been very impressed with that because nowadays wolves are a very polarizing topic. You don’t know if you’re going to get the hatred, you don’t know if you’re going to get the fear and uncertainty from people that don’t know much about them, or if you’re going to get just this blind love and loyalty that comes from the pro-wolf side. I’m obviously pro-wolf, but I don’t want to go too far on that side. I have to be scientifically rigorous about things so I still have to go and investigate. If they do depredate an animal or if they are harassing a house then I still have to try to help out the human aspect of it, too. Beaver activity there where they chewed off some of the bark and they chewed that tree down. Wolves, when they come into an area that they haven’t previously been in before, they impact absolutely everything. They’re apex predators. They can help stabilize beaver populations. And once beaver populations are stabilized, you can get improved river conditions. They can change the temperatures of the water, make streams better for trout. They can allow vegetation to come back to river corridors. And once that vegetation comes back, you can reduce your sediment loading in your rivers, you can increase the number of nesting bird species that come into those areas, and it also keeps your deer herds healthier. It’s not just that they’re at more stable levels for the vegetation, but they will take out the old and the weak and the sick. And then all of a sudden, you have a fit deer population which is obviously a better population to have.

– We’re very fortunate to where we, as the Bad River Band, have been able to build up our Natural Resources Department and really making it a strong entity for protecting everything that means the world to us. Creating a Ma’iingan plan to help protect Ma’iingan to integrate that TEK, that “traditional ecological knowledge” into the more technical templates that your typical biologist might utilize. It’s a very beautiful dialogue when a biologist sits down with one of our gichi-aya’aa, our elders, and they sit down together and they talk about things because they do, they teach each other.

– I thought the idea of a wolf management plan: it’s going to be loved, it’s going to be well-received. The tribe is obviously pro-wolf. It never crossed my mind that “management” was going to be a taboo word, but it turns out that some people look at it as, you know, you’re trying to manage your brother, or control your brother and that seems like an inappropriate thing. That’s not a natural thing, as opposed to just coexisting with your brother and trying to be a steward of your brother. Set them up for success. That’s all we’re really trying to do. We’re trying to protect their habitat ’cause they can succeed on their own. They don’t need us for that. That’s why we ended up settling on wolf protection plan, ’cause ideally, we wanted to be stewards of the wolf population, but we ultimately want to protect it as well. The reservation is listed as a wolf sanctuary. So, it’s a place where wolves are not allowed to be trapped, they’re not allowed to be harmed or harassed so that tribal members and people that visit the reservation can have these opportunities to see these animals and hear these animals and just to know they’re there. There’s something to be said just for knowing they’re there, and that they’re performing their ecological function. There’s a value, an inherent value in that.

– Rabbet Before Horses Strickland: I just had this idea of the last waterhole. There’s 11 manidoo that I always use. Those are the ones I’ve always seen in dreams. So, I figured out who they were, ’cause usually the winds are blowing air like Botticellis, yeah. They’re not people, they’re spirits, except for he’s half Nanabozho. That’s his grandmother, Nookomis. That’s the North Wind, that’s the South Wind. That’s the West Wind, and that’s his dad. One day, she was picking berries in a field and a sudden gust of wind. That was it, conception of Nanabozho. Anyway, they’re sitting around this waterhole, it’s the last waterhole, and they’re creating a new Earth. I’ll make a grid on here bigger. That takes a while to figure the scale out, and then I’ll just transfer ’em.

– What we always tell our children is that our stories are so important because they teach us how to be. You can listen to a story like how this place was created, you can listen to a story about Ma’iingan, and if you listen to it one time you might get something out of that. You might learn something about yourself, but you go and you listen to it again, and you pick up something completely different that you would have never thought of before. And that’s how our way of life is. We don’t just sit down and read a book, and then know all of our stories and what to draw out of ’em. We spend our life learning about these things. Yay! Giinitam, Giinitam. We try to speak to our daughter…

– Child: Ay-yay?

– …in the language as much as possible.

[clapping]

She loves stories. Almost one-years-old now, but she loves, loves just listening to stories. So, that’s how we’re going to battle some of the things that our people are up against these days. It’s our stories, our teachings, our way of life that are going to save our children as they become rooted in their identity and know who they are. That’s what’s going to help us.

[drumming and singing]

Whoo-hoo-hoo!

[percussion music]

– Boozhoo. “Biidaabanookwe” nindizhinikaaz. Migizi ninooodem. Mitaawangaa nindoonjibaa. My English name is Wanda McFaggen. I come from the Migizi Clan, the Eagle Clan. Sand Lake Community is my home within the St. Croix Reservation. I’d like to tell a story about the wolf, Ma’iingan, and how he came to be with us here on earth. When the Creator first formed the land here, the last one that he lowered down to the earth was Anishinaabe, original man. Anishinaabe asked the Creator why did he put him here alone. So then, after the Creator thought about it, the Creator gave him a companion, and that companion was a wolf, Ma’iingan. When they had walked here together, they became very close, like brothers. And we still consider Ma’iingan to be our brother today. After their journey was done, the Creator had told them that they have to go to separate paths, but they would always stay close. He told them, “What will happen to one will also happen to the other.” That was true because if you look back in our history, we lost a lot of our land. We lost a lot of our way to the point where we were almost became extinct. Assimilated. And if you look back on Ma’iingan’s history, you can see the same. Anytime that I see Ma’iingan, I put tobacco down out of respect. We have to take care of him because if he vanishes, who knows? We may vanish, too.

– His face, does he look big? Maybe his forehead, huh? Right here. Bring it down a touch. These are all the manidoo I use every time. Someone said, “How come you don’t put more women in?” I said, “Well, “there’s Nookomis and Winona, and two of the winds. I can’t make all the winds women.”

[Rabbett laughs]

In this one, I made the Eyes of the Dead a woman. Usually, that was a man, but it doesn’t matter. Eyes of the Dead, it’s just the past. It’s always there. It’s always present. It’s just the eyes of all the native indigenous people who have died in the taking of this country. It’s a reminder. Nookomis, that means grandmother. A very wise old woman. Basically, just all our oral traditions go back with her being the grandmother and bringing up Nanabozho. Up here, they say Wenabozho.

[flute music]

It’s not about me or anybody else. This will be here for the youth, you know, tomorrow. The eighth generation. And now, and the ancestors. That’s what all of my work’s for. That’s it. It’s for the present, the past, and the future which all exist now anyway, right? We don’t have a past and future without the present. It’s all here.

[chuckles]

Right?

– Lacey Hill-Kastern: Here we have the Kakagon Sloughs Pack. We’ve got the Little Girl’s Point/ Morrison Creek Pack, West Firelane pack, and then, the Potato River pack. The purple line is the boundaries of the Bad River Reservation, and then the red line is this proposed six mile buffer in our wolf plan. I’m Lacey Hill-Kastern. I am the Wildlife Program Manager for the Bad River Tribe. I started working for the tribe back in 2010, so I’ve been here for seven years now, and basically, I oversee the entire wildlife program for the reservation, and part of that is wolf monitoring. Though we actually started monitoring for wolves, trapping and radio collaring wolves back in 1996, so the tribe’s been doing that work for 21 years now. We want to protect the wolves on the reservation, but we also want to look at neighboring landowners and like other agencies as well, because the wolves they don’t know political boundaries, so they’re coming on and off reservation and we can put whatever we want for protection for ’em on reservation, but we have four packs of wolves and they go on and off reservation so our protections aren’t good enough to protect those tribal wolf packs. So we really want to work with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and also neighboring landowners too, and just like, “How do they feel about wolves?” and, kind of, explain to ’em why it’s important to protect at least these tribal wolves. Ma’iingan is very important to the Ojibwe culture, and is seen as a brother. The Creator told ’em that they needed to walk in separate paths, but what happened to one would happen to the other. So that’s really important for a lot of the Ojibwe people.

– That story and Ma’iingan, that’s something that we try to raise all of our children around in our communities to understand those relationships. That relationship of reciprocity with everything in Creation, especially those things that have walked that path with us. Ma’iingan is one of those beings that has always been there by our side and has also been there to watch out for us, much like it’s our responsibility today to watch out for him as well, because our lives parallel each other. In our tribal communities, we have leadership that is tasked with the responsibility of taking care of our people and watching out for our people. Ma’iingan in their communities, they do the same as we would do in our tribal community. You know, watching out for one another, taking care of each other, feeding each other. Very similar things that I don’t think a lot of people think about as much.

– So, this is a regular VHF collar. So, this is typically what we use to collar wolves. This is what’s been used for collaring wolves for many years. This will go on the animal. This VHF portion will hang on the bottom, and this is what emits the radio signal. We work closely with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for radio tracking efforts. This is the time of year that we typically trap. A lot of the traps we actually set right on the roads ’cause we have a lot of backroads on the reservation, and the wolves use the roads a lot as travel corridors. We use foothold traps, and they’re designed just to grab the wolf by the toes between the foot pad and the toe pads, so it doesn’t injure the wolf. Once a wolf steps in that trap, it’ll grab between those pads and then, it’s on a drag system so the wolf can actually pull the trap and run into a more wooded area. And then, it’s got a grapple hook on a chain that’ll tangle around a tree or vegetation and hold the wolf there until we get there. Wolves are pretty docile in the trap. They’ll usually just be laying there. We use a ketamine / xylazine mixture to immobilize. And then, we’ll put the radio collar on ’em, and then give ’em a reversal drug, and then just let ’em wake up, and continue to monitor ’em and make sure everything’s okay.

– I’ve got some smelly products underneath that rock that when a wolf is traveling these roads at night, and smell that, in order for them to really get to what they’re smelling they’re going to have to come up to this rock here and place a foot, ideally right here is where they’re going to place the foot to brace themselves and then reach and move the rock or nuzzle the rock with their nose. And ideally, that’s where their foot’s going to be is where the trap is set right now. And then, they’ll be caught. If the wolf comes in here and works a set, you can see its tracks really well and so that’s something we’re looking for. And then, also, if you’re unfortunate enough the wolves will taunt you sometimes. And they will literally come up and turn around and will drop a scat bed right on the trap. They came in, they smelled your bait or the lure, they weren’t impressed, and they left you their calling card I guess.

[Ethan laughs]

– Hill-Kastern: We do have lone wolves on the reservation. They kind of will skirt the boundaries between the packs, go further in another pack’s home range, but they usually don’t stay there for too long. We had one collared wolf that we collared back in 2010, my first year working here. And he had dispersed after about two months of me being here and he actually started a new pack down in the Rice Lake area. So, it was really interesting. Because of the radio collars, we were actually able to see where some of these individuals are going. One of my wolves– We had collared this individual down here. That’s why there’s a lot of points in that area because I was getting locations every three hours after the collaring had occurred. And then, this blue area actually covers 180 square miles, which average home range is like 40 to 80 square miles, and he was covering 180. It was just insane. But then, he ended up joining the Potato River pack. But late winter around February is when they’re breeding. He would take a hike down to the Mercer area. So, he’d be down there for a couple weeks, then he’d come back to the Potato River pack area which was fascinating.

– Now, I’ll just work on this little section right here. That’s where I was. Maxfield Parrish would use ink on his. And there’s no problem with this. I can just go around it. I don’t have to go over it or anything. When I glaze it, I can just glaze around it with a transparent glaze. The technique is really old. Leonardo used it and Maxfield Parrish used it. It’s seeing the light through one color going through another color and it just changes it into a nice mix. It’s actually using light to mix. This one, I’m going to use two glazes I think, two grounds. I’m going to use a blue for the skin, and then the rest, I’m going to use like a Naples yellow and a burnt sienna. Find a medium in there, a nice color, nice hue, I mean. Okay, I’m done with that. Ay yi.

[laughing]

I’m going to go up here. It’s shadowy up here.

These are all manidoo. I just put ’em in human form. Zhaawani. I don’t know. The four winds are right there, and Nanabozho’s moon. That’s his light for the night. And the only reason I figured out he’s the moon is he had a tattoo of the moon on his face. I think it’s just a passion now. It’s not even about… what other people think. I would do it anyway.

– Hill-Kastern: All right, one, two, three.

[all howling in a chorus]

[laughing]

– That was cool. Let’s do it again!

– I’m working on planning a big educational event for Wolf Awareness Week in October. We have a program through our Natural Resources Department that once a month we try to have these different activities to get youth more involved in the natural resources. So far, I’ve done the VHF tracking with ’em, we’ve done some winter tracking, and I’d really like to get some kids out and do some wolf howling. So anywhere from three to eleven wolves. So, is Edith here?

– I’ve been asked to come in and tell everybody a little bit about Ma’iingan. Now, we know she’s been saying, “Wolf, wolf, wolf.” In our language, the word for it is Ma’iingan. Can everybody say that?

– All: Ma’iingan.

– Right on. There’s a story about Ma’iingan, and the story has to do with a person. His name was Anishinaabe. And he asked the Creator, the Creator of all living things, “Can I have somebody to walk with me?” And so, the Creator sent Ma’iingan.

[boy howling]

– Great job.

– Woman: And Ma’iingan and Anishinaabe walked together for the longest time. But there came a time when they had to part their ways. They came to a fork in the road that they had to leave each other, but Ma’iingan said, “I will always be there for you.” And Anishinaabe said, “I’ll always be there for you, too. And whatever happens to you, will happen to me.” So, we always look at Ma’iingan and we remember that time that we walked with Ma’iingan, and we take care of Ma’iingan ’cause we remember what happens to Ma’iingan will happen to us.

[fire crackling]

– You know, I wanted to be a wildlife biologist ever since I was a little girl, so actually being it now and getting to go out and study wolves and study eagles, it’s awesome. It was really fascinating when I was working on the wolf plan and seeing that, wow, in 1996, we already had three packs on the reservation. That’s amazing! So because I think, in the state of Wisconsin in 1996, the population was only around 300, and now we’re at around 925. And even 21 years ago, we already had those three packs established on the reservation.

– Dylan Jennings: Despite what’s out there in popular culture, in books, you see a lot of Ma’iingan being portrayed as, you know, the Little Red Riding Hood wolf and you see a lot of movies about werewolves and other things that really do spook people and freak people out, but we were always taught not to be afraid of that. That when they presented themselves to us to be seen, that it was a blessing. It was a gift. You put down your tobacco.

[rain falling]

That those ones were part of our way of life, part of a very, very important part of Creation and that it was a gift to have an encounter with Ma’iingan.

– I see gentleness. I don’t see this Red Riding Hood version, and I’m not sure why stories like that came about. We don’t read those kind of stories because they just give a bad light on our relative. They make him seem like he’s, “Don’t leave your child outside ’cause he’ll come and snatch him or something,” you know? They make him out to be something that I don’t believe he is. They’re beautiful. Just their whole characteristic, and how they care for their babies. They’re very protective of their babies. They don’t want nobody to hurt them, but they won’t hurt some of us around their babies because there’s that trust. And I believe somewhere in the back of Ma’iingan’s mind, all through their ancestry, I think they remember how they walked with us. So, when I see one, I put tobacco down. I’ve taken my grandson to zoos, and we see them back and forth, back and forth. And that’s hurtful. Because they shouldn’t be there like that. They weren’t meant to be there like that.

[flute music]

[waves crashing]

– Joe Rose: And so the Great Spirit, Gitchi Manidoo, told both Anishinaabe and Ma’iingan, “In many ways the two of you are alike. When you take a mate, it will be for life. Both of you will be excellent hunters.” And then, Gitchi Manidoo also spoke of prophecy. Telling of a time when others may come among you. Both of you will be hunted for your hair. Ma’iingan for his hide, Anishinaabe for his scalp. The Great Spirit told both Anishinaabe and Ma’iingan of Seven Prophecies. And so, today, we’ve entered into the age of the Seventh Fire, Niizhwaaswi Ishkode, when human beings encroach upon Ma’iingan’s territory, Ma’iingan retreats further and further into the wilderness, and so the time may come when there will be no wilderness. If that time comes, you Ma’iingan, you’ll pass out of existence. You’ll become extinct. And so, you Anishinaabe, if your brother Ma’iingan passes out of existence, you’ll soon follow. You will die of great loneliness of spirit.

– So, now we’re waiting to see clusters from the satellite collar, and if we see a number of them in one tight area in a short period of time, we know that it’s most likely either they have a kill there, or they have a den or rendezvous site there. These rendezvous sites are where they like to bring the pups when they’re done with the den. Once the pups are mobile and they refuse to stay in the den and they’re starting to eat meat, and roam around. And so, often at these rendezvous sites you can find bones that are chewed up with little puppy teeth marks on ’em. I’ve heard of people finding traffic cones, plastic bottles. Anything a puppy would chew on at home, a wolf pup is not above chewing on, as well. And there’s generally going to be one member of the pack that’s kind of acting as a nanny, there, and that could be male, female, older wolf, a younger wolf. They seem to take turns doing it. I think that’s why, historically, the tribes looked at them as being the brother of Native Americans because there’s just so many things about them that are similar. I mean we always say that it takes a village to raise children, and with a wolf pack, they absolutely use that principle. Every single member of the pack takes some kind of role in raising those pups whether it’s just leading them on a hunt, being a nanny for a little bit, bringing back food, and the way that they try to keep track of each other. They always want to know where each other are, so there’s almost unlimited numbers of parallels between humans and wolves if you’re really willing to look for ’em and be honest about it.

– Marvin Defoe. Lived in the woods, my family. So I’ve had many encounters with the Ma’iingan. Met face to face with Ma’iingan one time. Must have both hit that trail at the same time, about from me to you, and we both went, looked in each other’s eyes for about five seconds, you know, and he took off one way, I took off another way. You know, I think it startled both of us.

[receiver crackles]

– Ooh, she’s actually closer than I thought. I’d say she’s probably no more than half a mile away from us right now. We’ve definitely cut down some of the distance. We are closer. And it sounds like she’s just off of this trail. My guess is that if we start walking up this trail she’s going to try to circle around us and try to get a good idea of what we are. And then, she’ll probably move off a little further, but there’s a chance we can find some tracks up here and try to get a pack count potentially. She’s been hanging out in this general area, so there’s either a food source nearby, or there’s a chance she’s looking for a new den because we would expect her to be having pups within the next couple weeks or so.

[receiver pinging, crackling]

[laughing]

She already started to circle us. She’s crossed over to this side of the trail though for sure. What we see is we have a number of individuals that have come together after fanning out, and once they hit this deeper snow, they converge into a single-file line, which is very typical of wolves. And they’re trying to take the path of least resistance so that the one in the front breaking trail is the one expending the most energy, and the rest of them can just fall in line. And you’ll see this, the deeper the snow gets, the more you’ll see this type of behavior where they want to go single file. And then, once the snow is gone or it’s melting, they’ll be more likely to fan out and they’ll cover more distance. But we can see we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven sets of tracks converging on this first path, and then we have one, two, three, four converging on this. You can see my hand fits right inside there.

– Joe Rose: I remember one time I had a dog. We called him “Blizzard.” Next to our house every night, Ma’iingan, they’d holler over there. So, I watched that dog one time going over there. So, I got down on my hands and knees and I followed that dog over to that pack of wolves, and come right in there. Didn’t fight or didn’t holler. Just watching, they were just living. So when you live in the woods and you live amongst them, I’ve had nothing to be afraid of. You know, I’ve never had a bad experience with the Ma’iingan, all my encounters. And even seen a litter of their pups, watching ’em.

– As we were following a set of tracks, there was about 1-1/2 to 2 feet of snow, and we saw one area that didn’t have any snow in it. And then, we saw a head poke up and that’s how we knew right away that we had found the den. Then it was a mad scramble to try to catch all the little guys because they all went in different directions. “Ron, you go that way, you grab these guys. I’ll grab these guys.” All right, we got ’em corralled, but those two escaped again. So, when we were trying to make sure that they were staying warm, whenever we had one that we were done checking over, Ron would take it and put it in his coat, and so, at the end, he’s got six pups in his coat and they’re crawling up his back. Can’t exactly get ’em out of there very easily, but at the same time, it’s a pretty fun problem to have.

– This is another aspect of the dreams that I kept was the blue hair. I couldn’t really make out any detail. I could see hair though. It just looked like they were in a lot of wind so I tried to figure out a way to do that and that’s where I started using hair as wind, and buckskin for direction. That came after I stopped using reference. I stopped copying things, and so it was like a four-year transition into accepting what I could do on my own, and then the dreams started. At first, it was just like a regular dream. I didn’t know what the heck it was, but then, when it started repeating, it was kind of strange. Apparently, I wake up in my sleep and draw. It’s a scribble. I have a few of those. I don’t know where they are right now, but the style lends itself to doing any, like, just me making something up. Like, this was the idea of the last waterhole, you know. There’s no more and so they’re creating a new world out of this so it’s like a combination of the earth hunters, creation of a new world. You know, that’s all going into this. I’m taking people from the traditions and we put it into something new. I think being traditional, if you don’t add anything to it, it’s just going to die. So, you know, I bring new things in, I don’t know. People don’t have to like it. It doesn’t matter.

[flute music]

– And so, in those prophecies, the Great Spirit said that in the Age of the Seventh Fire that a new people would arise. The new people would turn and look back. They would retrace their footsteps that would take them back to ancient times and ancient knowledge. They’d pick up the sacred bundles that have fallen by the wayside. To get the teachings and the meanings of these bundles, they’d go to certain elders who had taken them underground for generations because of persecution. So, they say that Anishinaabe were given a very special gift. We refer to it as mashkiki. Loosely interpreted in our language, it means medicine. Along with that medicine goes a responsibility, and that responsibility is to go out and educate others as to how to live in harmony and balance with the natural world.

– Many of our elders will talk about that, about how we really had to put things– our way of life, our ceremonies, everything– underground and hold it close because it was really being forcefully ripped from us. And it’s not like that anymore. But it’s a long, long journey to bring that stuff back. It takes a lot. It takes a lot to rebuild your language infrastructure, takes a lot to bring our ceremonies back. It takes a lot of time, a lot of sacrifices.

[wolf pup howls a quick, high-pitched howl]

And now we see Ma’iingan, and the population has been doing pretty well, making its way back, but now, different entities want to put an end to that and stop some of that thriving, and that’s a scary thought to us, because as our communities start to do better as we bring back our way of life and bring it back strong as we can. We think about that, too. What’s going to happen to Ma’iingan?

– Even though I grew up in between two reservations and I’m Native American myself, I wasn’t raised with any of the traditions or any of the stories. I wasn’t raised hearing about how important wolves were and the spiritual connection. I wasn’t raised learning anything about the clans or anything like that. And since I’ve started working for Red Cliff, I’ve come to learn a lot about that. Some of it I’ve learned on my own, some of it with Ron. We’ve attended events, we’ve talked to some elders. Tried to learn the language a little bit more so we can understand a little bit of that aspect of it. We try to lay down tobacco when an animal has to be harmed or when we find one that met a bad time. I think we’ve learned from each other, we’ve learned from the tribe and we’ve certainly learned a lot from the animals. We’ve been humbled by them more times than we can probably count.

– Yeah.

– They made us realize that no matter what we read, those animals are not going to ever be put into some little box. There’s no black and white, just a lot of gray area with animals. They don’t care what the literature says.

– So, I’ve given some thought to that story of the Ma’iingan. It just comes up with a word that I think of is Anishinaabe: izhichigewin. Izhichigewin. It’s that you don’t just talk about or read about something, you live it. You practice, and along with that practice is you show respect. Every living thing there is on this earth, and when you make your moccasin tracks, you be careful so that when you look back, you can say you left some good tracks so that seven generations ahead, they too can make their moccasin tracks. But that story, the Anishinaabe and the Ma’iingan, if you know the story and you follow the teaching, that Ma’iingan is my brother, my own flesh and blood, my brother. That’s my brother. I love him as a family. And that is the essence of the feeling of Anishinaabe. We talk about that: Ma’iingan, that’s my brother. That’s my brother.

[paint brush swishing]

– There, that’s good. I’ll put it high just in case I pull it. I think I’m going to put Ojibwe over there. Rabbett and Ojibwe. Ojibwe ’cause I’m part of something bigger than me. I’ve always done that since I was 15, so. I just want to make the point that I’m just a part. I’m not it.

[flute music]

I didn’t dream this. It’s just of Creation. I have no idea why I did this.

[Rabbett chuckles]

A collective consciousness, yeah. The idea of the last waterhole. They’re creating a new world there. That’s the turtle. Maybe it’s kind of like up in “What’s in the News,” huh? But I beat it out, and this is the last waterhole. All that’s left is the spirit. No people.

[chuckles]

– And so, we’re living in very historic times now. And it’s predicted that in the age of the Seventh Fire that all humankind would come to a fork in the road and would be confronted with a choice. It was said that one fork in the road would be a hard surface, and the other fork in the road would be a more natural path. Today, we see that hard surface

[tide flowing]

that pollutes and destroys and upsets the natural balance of Mother Earth, the plants, the animals, the water, the air. In this eleventh hour of a very serious environmental crisis, we say “gaawiin” and that means, “No, it’s not going to happen.” We will win this battle. Miigwech. Mii iw. Aho.

[guitar music]

[flute music]

– To learn more about the six Ojibwe Bands in Wisconsin, visit WisconsinFirstNations dot o-r-g. To purchase a DVD of Ma’iingan: Brother Wolf, visit WPT dot o-r-g or call 800-422-9707.

[guitar music]

Ma’iingan: Brother Wolf was funded in part by: John and Carolyn Peterson Charitable Foundation, Bitzer Family Legacy Fund, Eleanor and Thomas Wildrick Family, Robert and Elke Hagge, National Endowment for the Humanities, The Focus Funds for Wisconsin Programming, and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.