The Anishinaabek: Michigan’s original people

By Tim Mulherin

Sun contributor

Excerpted from This Magnetic North: Candid Conversations on a Changing Northern Michigan, published by Michigan State University Press and available at Leelanau County bookstores.

As I undertook the research for this book, it made great sense to me to include voices from the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians (GTB) as the First Peoples in northwest lower Michigan. My initial contact was with JoAnne Cook, chief appellate court judge for the band and an outreach educator.

Cook sometimes teaches an adult education course at Northwestern Michigan College, “The History of the Anishinaabek.” Her historical overview incorporates cultural and spiritual aspects of the band, and she covers the legal issues involving treaties (which are still ongoing) leading up to tribal life in modern time and the efforts to restore and advance Native traditions. She is also in demand for presentations to civic groups and libraries throughout the region, most notably in the six adjoining counties that comprise the band’s service area: Benzie, Charlevoix, Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Manistee, and Antrim. According to Cook, the GTB has approximately 4,600 tribal members.

Cook, 55, grew up in Peshawbestown just south of Omena, toward the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula. When we speak by phone in mid-June 2022, it is not so much as interviewer to interviewee, but reversed somewhat, as teacher to student.

Historians have determined that the Anishinaabek—meaning the “Original People” who claim Algonquin heritage—have been in the Grand Traverse region for thousands of years, Cook says. They migrated to the Great Lakes from northeastern North America coastal areas, following the St. Lawrence River inland. Bemusedly, she mentions that researchers recently found proof of Native presence in the Grand Traverse region reaching back 13,000 years ago. Yet Anishinaabe oral tradition pushes that estimate even farther back, she notes, to “time immemorial.” She adds, “Even though we know the story, science is catching up with us.”

Early into our conversation I ask about the GTB’s concerns about environmental threats to the region, exacerbated by the influx of visitors and relocators. Cook responds by bringing up the Anishinaabe creation story and how humans came to be placed on Earth as the last species by the Creator. “So then, what does that mean?” she asks as a prompt to provide the answer: “You know your place. Our whole philosophy is about living in balance, and that means with everyone and everything in creation: animals, plants, water.” Among the Anishinaabek, respect for animal life was honored long before such modern-day progressive movements espousing love of Mother Earth and all its creatures. “All Anishinaabe people believe and know that she is our mother,” Cook emphasizes.

She asks if I have read or heard of The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway, written by Eddie Benton-Banai, an Anishinaabe Ojibway, and notably, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s. I had not. She explains that Benton-Banai wrote it in the style of a children’s book for all his people, members of the Three Fires Confederacy, which includes the Ojibwe/Ojibwa (Chippewa), Ottawa (Odawa) and Potawatomi (Bodowadomi).

In the origin story, Earth experienced a worldwide flood, which sounds remarkably like the story of the cataclysm in the Christian Old Testament’s book of Genesis. “The original people turned away from our way of life and started to war and not to take care and be good Anishinaabe. So, the Earth was destroyed—flooded—and all of the First Peoples were gone,” Cook relates. As I, she thinks such uncanny parallel cross-cultural stories are “amazing.” After the flood, Turtle Island—a new Earth built upon the shell of a great turtle—was created.

I purchase a copy of The Mishomis Book, and as I discover, it’s a must read for anyone interested in Anishinaabe tradition, mythology, culture, and history. I pay particular attention to the Seven Fires prophecies. These prophecies predate the European arrival in North America and were revealed to the Anishinaabek before they arrived in the Great Lakes region by seven visiting prophets. As written by Benton-Banai, the Seventh Fire itself predicts a new people’s emergence, described as the Light-skinned Race:

“It is at this time that the Light-skinned Race will be given a choice between two roads. If they choose the right road, then the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and Final Fire—an eternal fire of peace, love, brotherhood, and sisterhood. If the Light-skinned Race makes the wrong choice of roads, then the destruction which they brought with them in coming to this country will come back to them and cause much suffering and death to all the Earth’s people.”

The Ojibwe and other Indigenous North American people have interpreted these two roads as being technology and spiritualism. Benton-Banai continues: “They feel that the road to technology represents a continuation of the headlong rush to technological development. This is the road that has led modern society to a damaged and seared Earth. . . . The road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional Native people have traveled and are now seeking again.”

Cook tells me that we are now in the time of the Seventh Fire prophecy. This second-to-last Anishinaabe prophecy says that the Light-skinned Race will approach the First Peoples wanting to learn more about Native life—which is already happening. Says Cook, “Lighting the Eighth Fire will be dependent on the choice that the non-Native people choose: the road of technology or the road of saving our Earth and understanding the importance of it.” It appears that we may well be transitioning now to the time of the Eighth prophecy.

I ask her what the band thinks about all the people coming to the area, not just ever-increasing numbers of tourists but those who have moved here during the pandemic and now, though a trickle, due to climate change in their previous states of residence. “We’ve had concerns about that for about six hundred years now,” she quips, laughing with me as I recognize the shortsightedness of my question. She notes, “We lost our land in Leelanau County because people kept moving in.” Then she adds, “You’re not going to stop the influx of people here. But the more you can educate them on the region and the history of where they’re moving to is really beneficial.”