Search

The Great Lakes is a chain of inland lakes – Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior – stretching from New York to Minnesota.

Because they comprise such a large waterway, they have played a vital role in the lives and histories of Indian peoples who have resided along their shores for millennia. Most Indian groups living in the Great Lakes region for the last five centuries are of the Algonkian language family.

Abbass, D.K.. "Ribbonwork." In Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Pub., 1994. 557-559.

"Indian Country Wisconsin - Great Lakes History: A General View." Milwaukee Public Museum. http://www.mpm.edu/wirp/icw-21.html

Marriott, Alice. “Ribbon Appliqué Work of North American Indians, Part I.” Oklahoma Anthropological Society, 6 (1958): 49-60.

For Indian tribes in the United States, sovereignty and treaty rights are key issues involving historic and modern-day relations between tribes -- as nations with the ability to govern themselves -- and the federal government of the United States.

Both sovereignty and treaty rights rely on the historic recognition that Native American tribes possessed the lands they lived on when Whites came to this

The health and well-being of community members were of prime importance, and Great Lakes Indians people had a number of techniques which they used to prevent and cure various illnesses.

Both illnesses of the body and the spirit were recognized and had specific cures and preventative techniques. Minor illnesses of the body could sometimes be cured by a sweat bath or by taking an herbal or other remedy.

Robert Ritzenthaler and Frederick Peterson: An “Ethnographer’s Paradise” (1954)