As promised in a posting on 11/23, I rummaged about in my basement over the Thanksgiving Day holiday weekend and found my old copy of A Pictorial History of the American Indian by Oliver La Farge. Boy, did that bring back memories! And to carry the memories on to the next generation, I was pleased to be able to share the book with my nine-year-old daughter for her school project on the Onandaga Indians of New York State. With an assist from her older sister—who had the same assignment a few years ago—she built a handsome, rustic Onandaga longhouse (pictured above) to go with her report on the Iroquois tribe.
Also, as promised, I looked up "Ojibwe" in the index to see what La Farge had to say about the Algonquin tribe featured in William Kent Krueger’s Thunder Bay. According to La Farge, the Ojibwe, also known as the Chippewa, “still live in fragments of their ancient homeland, in Wisconsin and Minnesota, where once they had Lake Superior and Lake Michigan at their disposal. A wigwam people . . . They did very little farming, but fished on a tremendous scale.” The Ojibwe were also known as “good fighters.” Which will be no surprise to those who followed the tumultuous life story of the Ojibwe warrior turned medicine man, Henry Lemoux, in Thunder Bay.
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