Ojibwe

The names are a trap for the unwary reader, and worth setting out plainly. Ojibwe, Ojibwa and Ojibway are three spellings of one word. Chippewa is the same word again, worn down in the mouths of English speakers and fixed in United States treaties, which is why many band names in Minnesota and Wisconsin carry it. Saulteaux names the western communities. Anishinaabemowin is what speakers call the language themselves, from Anishinaabe, the people. The atlas holds them as one entry because they are one language, and lists the rest as aliases.

It is Algonquian, in the central group, and it forms a continuum rather than a set of separate tongues. Algonquin in Quebec, Odawa in southern Ontario and Michigan, Southwestern Ojibwe in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Saulteaux on the plains and Oji-Cree in the north shade into one another, and neighbouring varieties are mutually intelligible while the ends of the chain are not.

The grammar is polysynthetic and verb-centred, and one feature of it carries theological weight. Ojibwe sorts every noun into animate or inanimate, and the sorting is not what an English speaker would guess. Manidoo is animate. So are the sun, thunder, tobacco, and certain particular stones and kettles. The category is not a grammatical accident laid over a neutral world; it is a statement about what kind of thing can act.

Two writing systems are in use: a Latin double vowel orthography, standard in the United States and much of Ontario, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics in the north and west.

Anishinaabe religious life is conducted in Anishinaabemowin, and the register in which it is conducted is distinct from ordinary speech. Names given at a naming ceremony are Ojibwe names and are understood to describe something seen; the aadizookaanan, the sacred narratives, are told in winter and are themselves treated as beings rather than as stories about beings; the songs of the Midewiwin lodge are in an archaic and formulaic Ojibwe that members learn as part of their instruction.

That last body of material is restricted. The Midewiwin is an initiatory society with graded membership, and its songs and teachings are not public property. Nineteenth century ethnographers obtained and printed some of it, and the printing does not make it open. The atlas describes the existence and function of this register and does not reproduce it.

The birchbark scrolls belong here too, and are commonly misdescribed. The figures incised on them are not an alphabet and do not spell Ojibwe words. They are mnemonic: a sequence of images that fixes the order of a song or a rite for someone who already knows the material, and that is unreadable to someone who does not. They are a record keyed to the language rather than a writing of it, and their relationship to the songs is the same as that of a knotted string to a debt.

Because so much of the tradition sits inside the language, language revival and religious continuity are the same project. Immersion schooling is now the main instrument of both.