William Whipple Warren (May 27, 1825 – June 1, 1853) was a historian, interpreter, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. The son of Lyman Marcus Warren, an American fur trader and Mary Cadotte, the Ojibwe-Metis daughter of fur trader Michel Cadotte, he was of Ojibwe and French descent. His mother was Ojibwe and he learned her culture from her family. He is the first historian of the Ojibwe people in the European tradition.
Bilingual and educated in the United States style, Warren started collecting stories from the oral tradition of the Ojibwe to tell their history. He drew from oral history to tell about the people prior to their encounter with Europeans, and combined it with documentation in the European style. After suffering from tuWilliam Whipple Warren (May 27, 1825 – June 1, 1853) was a historian, interpreter, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. The son of Lyman Marcus Warren, an American fur trader and Mary Cadotte, the Ojibwe-Metis daughter of fur trader Michel Cadotte, he was of Ojibwe and French descent. His mother was Ojibwe and he learned her culture from her family. He is the first historian of the Ojibwe people in the European tradition.
Bilingual and educated in the United States style, Warren started collecting stories from the oral tradition of the Ojibwe to tell their history. He drew from oral history to tell about the people prior to their encounter with Europeans, and combined it with documentation in the European style. After suffering from tuberculosis for many years, he died as a young man of 28 from a hemorrhage on June 1, 1853 and was buried in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His history was published posthumously in 1885 by the Minnesota Historical Society. A revised, annotated edition was published in 2009....more