The Megis Shell Migration and the Ojibwe Today

Anishinaabe oral history tells of a migration from the Atlantic shore up the St. Lawrence and through the Great Lakes, guided by prophecies of a sacred megis shell that would appear at appointed stopping places, ending where food grows on water, the wild rice beds of the western lakes. Madeline Island in Lake Superior became the spiritual center of the Ojibwe world, and by the eighteenth century Ojibwe bands held territory from present-day Ontario and Quebec across Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota into Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The fur trade made the Ojibwe pivotal partners of French and later British commerce, and the treaty era that followed ceded vast lands in both the United States and Canada while reserving rights to hunt, fish and gather wild rice that Ojibwe nations still defend in court. Government boarding schools in the United States and residential schools in Canada punished the language and drove the Midewiwin underground through the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century.

Today the Ojibwe are among the largest Indigenous peoples of North America, with well over one hundred bands and First Nations. Anishinaabemowin is taught in immersion schools and universities; wild rice harvesting, maple sugaring and treaty fisheries remain living economies as well as ceremonies; and Midewiwin lodges again meet openly. Basil Johnston wrote his books to carry the heritage to Ojibwe readers first, one measure of a tradition that survived a century of suppression with its center intact.