The Ojibwe originally lived near the
mouth of the Saint Lawrence River. A prophecy containing a vision of a floating seashell referred to as the sacred
miigis, warned the Ojibwe that they needed to migrate westward, otherwise the people would perish. According to oral histories, this trek may have taken hundreds of years. At the Straits of Mackinac, the channel of water connecting Lake Huron
and Lake Michigan, the vision ended, and the Anishinabe divided into three
groups. One group, the Potawatomi, moved south and settled in the area
between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. A second group, the Ottawa, moved
north of Lake Huron. A third group, the Ojibwe, continued westward and settled along the western
shore of Lake Superior. The vision that told them to search for their
homeland in a place “where the food floats on water.” The Ojibwe
recognized this as the wild rice they found growing around Lake Superior, and they settled on the sacred site of what is known today
as Madeline Island, part of the Apostle Islands east of Duluth. By the 1600's they were well established across the Great Lakes region when the French fur traders arrived.
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| Miigis shell |
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