My Grandfather's Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation

by Brenda J. Child

When Ojibwe historian Brenda Child uncovered the Bureau of Indian Affairs file on her grandparents, it was an eye-opening experience. The correspondence, full of incendiary comments on their morals and character, demonstrated the breathtakingly intrusive power of federal agents in the early twentieth century.

While telling her own family's stories from the Red Lake Reservation, as well as stories of Ojibwe people around the Great Lakes, Child examines the disruptions and the continuities in daily work, family life, and culture faced by Ojibwe people of Child's grandparents' generation—a generation raised with traditional lifeways in that remote area. The challenges were there were few opportunities for work. Government employees and programs controlled reservation economies and opposed traditional practices. Nevertheless, Ojibwe men and women—fully modern workers who carried with them rich traditions of culture and work—patched together sources of income and took on new roles as labor demands changed through World War I and the Depression.

Child writes of men knocking rice at wild rice camps, work customarily done by women; a woman who turns to fishing and bootlegging when her husband is unable to work. She also recounts that one hundred years ago in 1918-1919, when the global influenza pandemic killed millions worldwide, including thousands of Native Americans, a revolutionary new tradition of healing and anti-colonial resistance emerged in Ojibwe communities in North the jingle dress dance. All of them, faced with dispossession and pressure to adopt new ways, managed to retain and pass on their Ojibwe identity and culture to their children.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Indigenous, Memoir, Native American

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2014

About the author

Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies
at the University of Minnesota, and former Chair of the Department of American Indian
Studies. She is the author of several books in American Indian history including
Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (1998), which won the North American Indian Prose Award; Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (2012); Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education (with Brian Klopotek, 2014). Her 2014 book My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation won the American Indian Book Award and the Best Book in Midwestern History Award.

She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian and past-president of the Native American & Indigenous Studies
Association. Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota
where she is a member of a committee writing a new constitution for the 12,000-member nation.

Reviews

[Anya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admit I sped read this to the max on the plane from SF —> MSP. Last minute research for reporting trip!! Informative and revelatory. It’s helping all the pieces click into place :)

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently completed this brief history of family life of the Ojibwe people (North America Native Americans), specifically in Red Lake, Minnesota and its relation to family life. Brenda Child is a professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and author of three books that discuss various topics about Ojibwe life with an insightful look into her own family history.

I received this book for my birthday about a month ago and I was very excited, not only because the title and description were enticing but because of my own Ojibwe ancestors. Growing up on Sugar Point, a small reservation off of Leech Lake in Minnesota, I felt a small light go on inside me when I picked up this book because of it's close connection to my people as well as geographically to where I grew up.

This book provides information not only about how labor has evolved for the Ojibwe people, not necessarily of their making, but of the aggressive ideals of the United States Government and the state of Minnesota. Child's research is abundant, providing the reader with a very visual look into how dispossession and exploitation have specifically changed the gender roles dealing with labor in Ojibwe families but also with the extreme poverty that Ojibwe families suffered (and still suffer). Child also explores how the role of women in regards to labor, in the Ojibwe family, was vital for family survival and due to my own experiences, I know that it still is.

It was refreshing as a descendant of a proud Native American family to read about the specifics behind the exploitation of the Ojibwe that I have been told about since I was a little girl. I have grown up not knowing why ricing has become a more masculine enterprise than it every was before or how the Jingle Dress came to become a part the Ojibwe's way of healing, or that it was even meant for healing. It made me think about my teal jingle dress I had as a child and that I wore in parades and to the local pow-wow's, how my ancestors originally wore it for prayer, not for contests.

This is a great read and it provides a wonderful memoir that makes the reader connect with the Ojibwe people, whether they are Native American or not.

[Ai Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I've read this book twice and fallen in love with it two times at this point. When I first read excerpts of it for a class, a classmate described this book as a gift, and it truly was--reading about Child's grandmother, for example, brought tears to my eyes, especially in her resistance to agency surveillance in her life. So the first two chapters are just incredible gifts to the reader, and it definitely sucked me in on the second read.

The latter chapters are sort of a more traditional historical fare, but Child is so careful in her analysis, so attentive to gender and changes across time in the gendering of labor practices while also avoiding painting everything with a broad brush about that change. It's an incredible book and I strongly recommend it to anyone looking to know more about American Indian labor history, or just anyone looking for a really great, nuanced piece of nonfiction.

[Smaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am an Ojibwe from the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, one who writes and teaches history, and it has been equally challenging for me to connect and disentangle the story of my own family from the broader narrative of American Indian history. After working as a historian for my adult life, I have come to recognize that my family, like all Indigenous people who lived under the outpost of imperialism, has a seriously appalling story to tell about the most objectionable aspects of the colonial history of the United States. Dispossession, poverty, cultural destruction, paternalism, and racism are the framework of political narratives within American history, but they were experienced by Indian people in deeply human ways that always involved a loss of freedom."

[Taylor Alyssa Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Despite what the title leads one to believe, Child’s historiography focuses on Ojibwe women, particularly those of the early twentieth century in Red Lake, Minnesota.

While I think this book must have been more satisfying for the author to write than for anyone to read, I still learned a lot about Ojibwe culture. The chapter on jingle dresses was particularly interesting, as was the gendered lens on ricing.

Favourite quote:

“Just when Ojibwe women, and their communities, seem to have reached bottom, they also reached into the most creative and compassionate places in their souls to pick themselves up.” (160)

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. It is very much a family history, yet also includes history of life for Ojibwe people at Red Lake. Mentions of treaties, made and broken as well as the actions of the State of MN and Federal government are also included.