Anishinaabe

Anishinaabe country wraps the upper Great Lakes: from Manitoba and northwestern Ontario across Lake Superior's shores into Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and east to Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, the largest freshwater island on Earth. It is a world of wild rice beds, birchbark, sugar bush and canoe routes, held today by well over a hundred First Nations in Canada and tribal nations in the United States.

Anishinaabe tradition tells of a long migration west from the Atlantic to the place where food grows on water, the wild rice country, with Mooningwanekaaning, Madeline Island, as a historic centre of that world. The treaty record that followed the fur-trade centuries is vast and very much alive: modern harvesting rights on ceded lands were fought for and won again in courtrooms within living memory.

Anishinaabemowin remains one of North America's most widely spoken Indigenous languages: Canada's 2021 census counted 25,440 speakers of Ojibwe languages, with more across the US border, taught now in immersion schools, universities and a celebrated dictionary project, while Anishinaabe writers and artists carry the culture far beyond the lakes.

This is an introduction, the first layer. A full collection, like the Mapuche collection that opened this atlas, follows as research and review are completed for each people.