Ojibwe and Dakota

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The annual White Earth Powwow was so widely significant that Minnesota’s governors didn’t dare miss it. The powwow was one hub for the ceremonious sharing of religious practices. Credit: Minnesota Historical Society. 

Mni Sota Makoče, Anishinaabe Akiing

The story of religion in Minnesota is a story as old as the land itself from the perspective of Minnesota’s Indigenous peoples: the Dakota (Sioux) and Ojibwe (Anishinaabe, Chippewa).2 Minnesota, Mni Sota Makoče, is a Dakota name for these homelands of the eastern-most peoples of the Oceti Sakowin, Seven Fires, of Dakota and Lakota peoples comprising what the U.S. called the Sioux Nation. Ojibwe homelands in the northern part of the state are known to the Ojibwe people as Anishinaabe Akiing, translated either as the “land of the people” or “the people’s land.” While archeologists and historians point out the changes over time in Minnesota’s Indigenous populations, it is important to know that Dakota and Ojibwe peoples do not see their presence in Minnesota as an accident of history.

  1. The Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) Nation also claimed traditional lands in what is now extreme southeastern Minnesota.↩

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This 1848 painting depicts Bdote, the place of genesis for the Mdewakanton Dakota. 

Many people of one of the Seven Fires, the Mdewakanton Dakota, believe their genesis occurred at Bdote, the place where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet. Ojibwe people tell a sacred story of migration in which they journeyed, in obedience to a prophetic vision, from the Atlantic seaboard to the place “where food grows on the water,” referring to manoomin, or wild rice, their traditional staple and sacred food.3 

  1. Eddie Benton-Banai, The Mishomis Book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).↩

Dakota and Ojibwe presence in Minnesota, then, is as much a religious matter as it is a historical, ecological, or economic one.

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Manoomin, or wild rice, is sacred to the Ojibwe people.

Dakota and Ojibwe presence in Minnesota, then, is as much a religious matter as it is a historical, ecological, or economic one. It can be understood as a calling, a spiritual gift that involves ethical, day-to-day obligations of living on, and caring for, traditional lands and waters. Dakota and Ojibwe religions make sense in terms of the state’s lands and waters, of its plants and animals, and of traditional life ways that participate in the land’s natural cycles.