Potawatomi / Bode'wadmi: Artisans of the Midwest

The Potawatomi Tribe

It is a challenge to find information pertaining to the Potawatomi tribe for the exact reason that sets them apart in history; they were not involved in a major historical event such as battles or conflict, and therefore many historians simply don't see the 'reason' to write about them. Unlike the stereotype of Native people being primitive or warlike, the Potawatomi were very advanced in the arts of healing and craftsmanship and valued peace, finding glory in art and culture rather than war. The picture featured above is of Conapaka, a Medicine Man (circa 1900), which I chose to represent the values of peace and community, and the emphasis on advancement of health, botanical, and agricultural sciences. Although all of the resources I selected for this paper are secondary sources, as very few primary sources exist, I have evaluated al of them thoroughly and all five of them are created for the purpose of education, with no further bias or agenda beyond informing the reader. Three of them are, in fact, created by tribe members themselves, and all are reputable. 

The ‘Potawatomi’ or Bode’wadmi are a midwestern Native American tribe who's name means ‘those who tend to the hearth-fire’.  They were historically spread through most of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, but after contact were forced to either settle in smaller patches of their homelands or even south west to Kansas and the great plains, in an effort to make room in the upper midwest for French and English settlers. There was an estimated population of up to 15,000 tribe members at the time of contact, but after thirty years of they had decreased to 4,000 or less.

They spoke a polysynthetic Algonquian language (by the same name of the tribe itself) which has now mostly died out and is only spoken by less than a hundred people. They’d long had a written pictographical alphabet before contact with settlers, but in the mid-1800s, sometime between 1830 and 1860 Fr. Christian Hoecken and Fr. Maurice Gailland, two Jesuit missionaries, developed a romanized syllabic alphabet, and much later in the 1970s, the Wisconsin Native American Languages Program created a revised pedagogical alphabet was created for the purpose of teaching modern-day Bode’wadmi their own language.

The Bode’wadmi were relatives and allies to the Ojibwe and Ottawa tribes in an alliance commonly known as The Council of Three Fires. The role of the Bode'wadmi was as keepers of the fires, tending to the well being of both the people and the culture. The three tribes have many similarities in region, dress, arts, and language, and often cooperated and intermixed. The Bode'wadmi were mostly distinguished by a more sedentary lifestyle, and their focus on agriculture, farming, and medicine as opposed to hunting deer or fish like their neighbours.

The mythology of the Bode'wadmi is very similar to that of other Anishinaabe tribes such as the Ottawa, Ojibwe and Algonquin. The main characters of most Bode'wadmi stories are Nanaboozhoo, the hero, Nokmes, his grandmother, and Chibiabos, Nanaboozhoo's brother and the ruler of the dead. The spirits and monsters often mentioned in these myths are Deer Woman, Underwater Panther, Thunderbird, Mermen, Pa'is (little forest people, comparable to gnomes), and windigo, created from the spirits of evil Bode'wadmi turned into monsters as punishment.

Bibliography

Ager, Simon. "Potawatomi (Bode'wadmi)." Omniglot. Last modified 2015. Accessed October 8, 2015. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/potawatomi.htm.

Edwards, Rose. "Native Genealogy: People of 3 Fires." US Gen Web Project. Last modified 2004. Accessed October 8, 2015. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~minatam/.

"Native Languages of the Americas: Nanaboozhoo Stories and Other Potawatomi Legends." Native Languages of the Americas. Last modified 2015. Accessed October 8, 2015. http://www.native-languages.org/potawatomi-legends.htm.

"Native Languages of the Americas: Potawatomi (Nishnabek, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomi)." Native Languages of the Americas. Last modified 2015. Accessed October 8, 2015. http://www.native-languages.org/potawatomi.htm.

Sultzman, Lee. "Potawatomi History." Tolatsga. Last modified December 18, 1998. Accessed October 8, 2015. http://www.tolatsga.org/pota.html.

Image:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/342977327844497585.