A Penny for Your Thoughts

           It was long foretold in North American First Nation tribes that the white men would come. “In the time of the ancestors lived a Lakota holy man, Drinks Water, who dreamed of what was to be. In a dream Drinks Water saw all the four-leggeds go back into the earth and in their place a race of two-legged strangers wove a web around the Lakota. Then, in his dream, Drinks Water saw his people living in square gray homes, on a barren land (…)” (Kennedy, 1999).

 When the first wave of Europeans arrived on the shores of what we know today as Eastern Canada, the First Nations were curious about the strangers. Over time, their numbers would pour in, carried in large ships coming from the eastern sea. As their numbers grew, the longer the strangers remained and the deeper they ventured into the forestlands, the Anishinaabe people would learn that these newcomers would bring with them death and disease for years to come.

 However, this is not the only thing the Europeans brought with them that would inhibit the Anishinaabe people. With us, we brought our industrializing ways, which technically led to poverty. Over time, the gap between the poor and the wealthy grew, and it continues to grow even to this day.

In Pre-Contact times, Anishinaabe tribes lived and worked in close-knit communities. They relied on human, natural and social capital to uphold their community. Every individual in the tribe had a position; they each had a task to fulfill and required no monetary payment. They did not mass-produce products of innovation but used what their Creator gave to them on the land they lived on; and whatever they used, they only took what was needed for their populace. Not a single tree or animal more was taken, for in their culture, they must treat Mother Earth with the utmost respect. In a sense, their community capacity was dependent on their environment. They would not try to push and shove people together, taking down forests to permit expansion and decreasing the wildlife population in the process. “In the pre-contact era, aboriginal peoples were distributed unevenly across the Canadian landscape, population densities varying according to the ability of the lands to support human life.” (Miller, n.d). According to Trosper, there are three conditions for resilience of a community, those are: buffering disturbance, learning and self-organiztion (Trosper, 2003). The aboriginal communities definitely harnessed the power of these three conditions to achieve their resilience. 

           

           The aboriginal people lived in a way that was very in tune with nature and centrally based on a web of relationships. Every resource, every task and every hardship was shared amongst members of the tribe. Therefore, poverty, as we know it, was non-existant. However, this does not mean the Anishinaabe people lived simple, unproblematic lives throughout pre-contact history. Surely, they had their own complications that needed to be dealt with. In winter for example, sources of nourishment would become scarce. The beauty and the effectiveness of the intratribal system comes into play here. Families would band together to survive the hardships of nature.

There is much to be learned from the ancient ways of living of the Anishinaabe people as more and more people from our communities fall victim to the cruel reality of poverty.

Miller, J.R. The Pre-Contact Era. (n.d) Retrieved October 18, 2012, from http://www.multiculturalcanada.ca/Encyclopedia/A-Z/a1/5

Giizhik, Zhawaano. The Universe of the Ojibwe/Anishinaabeg. (n.d.) Retrieved October 18, 2012, from http://www.unieketrouwringen.nl/media/files/the-traditional-anishinaabe-world-view.pdf

Kennedy, Ira (1999). American Indian Prophecies. Retrieved October 18, 2012, from http://www.texfiles.com/features/prophecies.htm

Trosper, R. (2003) Resilience in Pre-contact Pacific Northwest Social Ecological Systems. Ecology and Society, Volume 7. Retrieved December 15, 2012 from http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art6/

~ Valerie