Having mostly escaped removal to areas further west, the Ojibwe remain in their ancestral lands, which stretch across the northern Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada westward to presentday Montana and Saskatchewan. More than 100,000 Ojibwe lived in the United States in 1990, forming the third largest American Indian people. The group consists of assorted bands, who share the same native language and customary behaviors. Never have the bands united into an organized whole. Originally they were organized into discrete groups of families bound by kinship. Everyone also belonged to a totemic clan, whose members had to marry outside the clan. Society was patrilineal—when a man and woman married, the woman joined her husband’s clan. Grandparents and grandchildren had a special relationship, as do Cally and her grandmother Zosie in Erdrich’s novel. Ojibwe life involved woodland gathering (of wild rice, maple and sugar) and hunting (for fish, deer and beaver). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the woodland Ojibwe became deeply involved in the fur trade with the French and British, who exchanged manufactured goods, such as firearms, metal implements, beads, cloth, and alcohol for furs, mostly beaver.
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