[gentle music]
- Biskakone Greg Johnson: Home is where we harvest our fish.
Home is where we knock the rice.
Home is out there in the canoes.
Home is when we're out there with our families,
and we're picking those berries,
getting scratched up in the thorns, you know, that's home.
Home is also above the clouds where our ancestors go,
into the stars, into Northern Lights.
That's our other home,
where we come from and where we go in the end.
Home is where we raise our children,
and home is where we make our life with our partner.
All of those things, you know,
that means home is a huge range, it's a huge range,
and within it, we can find all the things
that'll give us a good life.
[gentle music]
Every Ojibwe settlement
within Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin,
there's an abundance of wild rice.
For the Ojibwe people, that's what we know as manoomin.
[thunder rumbling]
We have a storm that's gonna roll in here,
and this rice right here, it's gonna come off,
it's gonna fall back in the water.
We bind this rice, anything that hits it,
the rice will not come off.
And it allows the rice to ripen,
and later we come back, we untie it, and we slap it,
and 100% ripe rice comes out.
So it's not lost back to the elements or the animal.
There's nothing that can get this rice right now.
The State of Wisconsin outlawed this form of rice bundlings.
It's illegal to do it, but me, as a cultural practitioner,
and a teacher and educator and father, hunter-gatherer,
I have the right to do this.
I have the authority from the Great Spirit
and my ancestors to do this.
We have to continue this type of thing on,
because without this knowledge, we're just descended from people
who used to call themselves Ojibwe.
[gentle music]
Growing up, I would go into these museums,
and I would see these amazing items.
I wanted to know how to make all the crafts,
all the Ojibwe things.
I wanted to know how to make the moccasins,
and I wanted to know how to make a canoe,
and I wanted to learn how to rice.
I wanted to be a good hunter and a provider for my family,
and it takes a lifetime to know something.
And so, I spent a good majority of my life
seeking that knowledge.
There's regular manoomin, which is brown or black,
but then, we have zaaga'iganii manoomin.
The rice is just harvested freshly off the lake.
It's still green,
and you only have a small window to make that.
These two elders, Grace and Delia Artishan,
they were talking about bead work,
so I just sat there and closed my eyes,
and I imagined everything they were talkin' about.
Grace was saying she puts the needle
with a thread on through, she strings it up,
pulls it all the way up, and she puts on four beads,
and then she puts the needle back through the material
and comes back through the last two and puts on four more.
And that's all I had to hear.
I took that, and then I went home that night,
and I tried it, tried it, tried it until I figured it out.
[gentle music]
And if nobody was around to teach me,
I taught myself how to do it, and it went on from there.
What my daughter Wasanodae is doing here,
she's dancing on the rice.
She's just rubbing her feet along the rice hull,
and what it's gonna do, it's gonna roll that jacket off.
I went to our museum, and I would look at the moccasins.
They were called the split toe moccasins.
And so I said, "I wanna be the one who revives these."
She's using just a little bit of her weight,
and she can feel that under her foot.
That's one of the important roles of the moccasins we make,
for beauty and for purpose.
After probably about 40 pairs, I finally figured it out.
Now I teach classes on moccasin making,
and I share my knowledge.
I might have figured it out after it was gone for a while,
but I don't own it.
The people own it, so I give that back
to our communities whenever I can.
- A lot of the traditional ways were lost,
so we really rely on those
who are bringing back crafts and arts,
where maybe we only have old journal entries
or illustrations or really old photographs
of these arts being practiced.
To start etching on the winter bark,
you need to first scribe a pattern in there with an awl,
and then you're really just working with negative space.
So you're removing the layer of bark that has tannins
to expose the summer bark underneath.
These winter bark baskets would be used
for gathering baskets and sugar containers
and all sorts of things for everyday life.
- Biskakone: The florals that we usually have depicted
on some of our items
are representation of the natural world.
We have tobacco leaves.
We have five-petal flowers, four-petal flowers.
Sometimes you'll see a squash blossom.
There's insects, dragonflies, butterflies,
and maybe you'll even see some rabbits or blue jays
once in a while.
- Many tribes, they've been really heavily affected
by assimilation and intergenerational trauma.
A lot of knowledge has been lost.
The aim was to strip our people from our traditional ways.
How I see it is that every day
where we are living our Anishinaabe culture
is a radical act of resistance
against those that would strip us from who we are.
[upbeat music]
- These nooshkaachinaagan, these winnowing baskets are made
so we can throw it up in the air,
and the chaff will blow away,
and the rice will come back down.
Traditionally, the parching and the dancing
and the winnowing was all done right near the rice bed,
and then they would fill their birch bark baskets up
with finished rice.
Birch bark is our most utilized possession in our culture.
This is a gift to us from creation.
What I'm looking for when I harvest it
is something that's kinda pliable,
something that's not too thin.
The thickness of the bark right here, we call basket bark.
Anything thicker than that is what we use
in our wiigwaasi jiimaan, our birch bark canoes.
If you get something thinner, it's called
masagnigin wiigwaas, which is almost like paper, paper bark.
So now, we have a mechanized form
of preparing manoomin,
and if our ancestors had that technology 100 years ago,
they'd be using it, just like we are today.
And so, we are our ancestors.
Everything they do, we still do it today.
And whatever method that we use today,
they would do the same thing long ago.
Yep, and you're gonna go around both of these right here.
- Wasanodae Johnson: Okay.
We're making a traditional cedar mat.
- This idea spawned from looking at old photos
of our people long ago, sitting on these mats and using them.
And what we've come to know recently
is that cedar is antibacterial.
When people dried their foods on there long ago,
it helped aiding in the preserving process.
Up, through, and down.
- My dad's always doing something new,
and feels like we're reviving something every day.
And for a long time, I didn't really appreciate it;
it was just my life.
But seeing how other people lived
versus being immersed in my culture,
it feels bigger than me.
My dad always says, "I'm carrying two bundles,"
or "I have the best of both worlds.
I get to walk both paths."
- Biskakone: Perfect, look at that.
- Anungo Kwe Alexandria: You have a tie to the place
of your ancestors,
and the place where your love is, where your family is,
that's where your home is.
Home has nothing to do with the house.
I love the house, but wherever the manoomin is,
and wherever the birch trees are, that's home,
and we'll have everything that we need.
- This lodge is what we call in Ojibwe language
as a waganogan.
That structure housed our people long ago,
and that kept our people safe.
It kept them outta the elements, and it gave 'em a place.
Our culture will house us
through our ability and knowledge
to make those wigwams and lodges.
Our culture will feed us through our treaty rights.
We have our religions to keep us sane
and to keep us focused.
We also have our crafts to give us therapy
and keep us focused as well,
so our culture's very much alive and thriving
here in Lac du Flambeau.
We're breathing it and living it every day.
[gentle music]