Providing meat for their families was primarily the job of men, although women sometimes hunted small animals. Hunting methods, based on extensive knowledge of the habits of game animals, included shooting with a bow and arrow or gun and setting various kinds of traps. Hunters had different arrows for different kinds of game: small ones [...]
Native people in the Great Lakes area recognized individually-owned property. Women and men owned their own tools, clothing, ornaments, and any gifts of property they received. Ojibwa husbands and wives owned property separately but lent their possessions to each other. These ideas about gender and property contrasted with those in colonial and early 19th century [...]
In the Great Lakes area, the local groups have shared a regional culture and also developed variations on this culture. The principal theme of regional culture is reciprocity, the belief that it is necessary and morally right to give something to get something in return. This idea has been expressed in the value placed on [...]
Ceremonial centers built by American Indians from about 2,200 to 1,600 years ago existed in what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, as well as elsewhere. The people who built these centers had previously lived more simply as hunters and fisherman and some had begun to domesticate native plants, such as goosefoot, [...]
In the early 17th century, French traders began to use Huron (or Wyandot) middlemen to trade with the Native peoples in the Great Lakes region. Native people belonged to several “ethnic” groups. The members of an ethnic group (for example Ojibwa or Menominee) spoke the same language and shared a common history and identity, but [...]
After the American Revolution, the U. S. began to sign treaties with Native groups, identified as Tribes, and increasingly tried to take on a dual role of protector and supervisor with sometimes disastrous results. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Indians still lived in villages where several Native groups, European traders, and mixed-ancestry [...]
