Howey’s big mistake?

A bad case of Anisinaabeg-centricity

Caption: Scene from Sun Watch Village, Dayton, Ohio, a replica Fort Ancient, Upper Mississippian village

    William Gustav Gartner, a geography professor at University of Wisconsin, (Madtown), got me interested in Meghan C. L. Howey. Gartner wrote a review of Howey’s book Mound Builders and Monument Makers of the Northern Great Lakes, 1200-1600. Since I’m compiling something large under the working title ‘1259 AD Great Lakes’ naturally I bought the book. Thanks for the tip Willi G.

    I found this especially interesting in Gartner’s review, “The most compelling part of her narrative details the spatial symbolism of paired enclosures. Both the setting and spatial layout of paired Late Woodland enclosures exhibit a topographical grammar that is very similar to an Ojibway oral tradition detailing Bear’s primordial journey with the Midé pack.”

    Howey herself equates the builders of the mounds in northern Michigan to the Anishinaabe, an Algonquian spiritual confederation which includes—Yes, it’s alive and thrives—the Three Fires of Ojibway, Ottawa and Potawatomi, along with many but probably, make that definitely not, all of the older Algonquin nations of the Great Lakes.

    On the Chicago Architecture Center website I found this, “Several Native nations share a connection to this region and to each other. These include Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi—all related Anishinaabe Tribes—in addition to Ho-Chunk, Kaskaskia, Kickapoo, Mascouten, Menominee, Meskwaki, Myaamia, Peoria and Sac and Fox.”

    The CAC would not publish unedited copy on their website. Ok, some stuff could fall between the cracks, but not something as important as the above statement. It also confirms what history tells us. (Notice I use ‘history’ not ‘prehistory’. I'm not sure ‘prehistory’ actually exists. It’s a little like ‘preplanning;’ can’t be done.)

    David Stothers and his famous others have discovered and confirmed the Kickapoo, Mascouten, Myaamia and Sac and Fox were one people in 1259. He calls them the Wolf phase of the Sandusky Tradition. Stothers has them resident in southeastern Michigan at the time the Great Ojibway migration reached the upper Great Lakes (1400-1450). This caused a lot of friction, as you'd imagine.     

    The History of Saginaw County (Michigan) has a long, elaborate account of how the Sauk were almost annihilated by the Ojibway faction. While the story is highly dubious, it does illustrate the level of animosity between the ancient Algonkins and these newcomers from the east. In other words, although they spoke an Algonquin language the Sauk were not Anishinaabe in 1259. Neither were the Menominee, but they are also Algonquin.

    In my reading the Anishinabe spiritual confederation is made up of the Three Fires Nations and its off-shoots specifically the Mississaugas, Nipissing and Algonquin peoples who broke away from the main body and created their own nations along that 500 year sojourn from New Brunswick to Michigan.

    According to Ojibway elder Edward Benton-Banai in his book The Mishomis Book, The Voice of the Ojibway, “It is thought that the migration started around 900 A.D.  It took some 500 years to complete. It is amazing that the Sacred Fire could be kept alive for so long.”

    Before that book was published (copyright 1988), It was common knowledge that the Ojibway were relatively recent arrivals to the Great Lakes. Jenks mentions it in his History of St. Clair County (1932) and I’ve read it elsewhere since I was a young seeker. The question is why didn’t Howey and, for that matter, Gartner know it. Methinks they may not be Michiganders and therefore not privy to our esoteric knowledge: Thank you Gabriel Richard Elementary.

    According to Wikipedia which cites Howey, “The Aetna Earthworks were likely constructed around 1200 +/- 100 AD.” (Quick aside: Aetna is a later name for Missaukee.) The mounds and earthworks Howey describes as Anishinaabe were being constructed around 1259, that’s 150 to 200 years before the estimated arrival date of the Ojibway cultural flotilla to Michigan. Yet Howey has them as builders of the earthworks and mounds in her study.

    To quote Howey (pg 83): “Late Prehistoric” (that word again) “Anishinaabe communities created rituals and constructed monuments with contrasting positions and roles in the landscape to facilitate local community coherence (mounds) and intersocietal exchange (earthworks) in a constantly evolving cultural landscape.”

    I agree with her that Michigan after 1259 was a “constantly evolving cultural landscape.” I agree with her that the mounds were built to show ancestral longevity on the land. I agree with her the circular enclosures, which must be considered sacred since they are circular, helped fabricate and contain ‘intersocietal exchange,” by which she means pan tribal exchange aka trade and ritual. (I had an insight that all trade among them was sacred and I believe at least some of it took place within those enclosures.) I agree with her that Anishinaabe communities used the earthworks. I just don’t believe they constructed them. I also believe the Wolf phase peoples used the circular enclosures they found in Michigan, but again I don’t believe they built them. I believe the original builders of these 1259 AD mounds and earthworks were the highest culture in Michigan at the time, maybe of all time.

    Stothers calls them in their various stages from around 700 to 1400 AD, Riviere au Vase, Younge and Springwells. For the sake of simplicity, I’m calling them Otseketa or St. Clair Huron. They were Iroquoian speaking people who evolved in place from the more ancient and earthy Woodland Algonquin. Oddly enough, it is likely these earlier Woodlanders were descendants of the aboriginal people who later in another branch became the Wolf phase, the folks who Stothers says ran off these same Otseketa Huron.

    Stothers waxes speculative about the origins of these ‘Ontario’ Iroquois around 500 AD. He sees the changes in cultural artifacts between the extant Woodland tribes and this new wave as so significant he believed there was an outside influence which caused it, it being the emergence of the Iroquois people in all their guises, New York, Ontario, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

    In his paper “The Emergence and Development of the Younge and Ontario Iroquois Traditions”  David Stothers wrote, “The cultural intrusion … appears to represent a coeval and analogous situation to that of southeastern Ontario, Pennsylvania, and New York State where some aspects of the fragmenting Hopewellian Interaction Sphere were ’fusing with local resident complexes after shifting into these other regions (Ritchie 1969).”

    He and Ritchie suggest the source of that change was an influx of people of the Hopewell Interaction Sphere who reached climactic proportions in their monumental earthwork construction in Ohio. While the Hopewell culture dissipated, the knowledge of geometry and construction would not. As esoteric knowledge it would have been kept alive in ritual and, if the Free Masons are any example, secret society.

    Howey spends a lot of time and effort fitting the Ojibway origin story about Bear into her thesis. On pg 138 she has two graphic diagrams, one titled 'Bear's Journey with the Midé Pack (Landes 1968: 107); the other titled Schematic of Missaukee Earthworks Spatial Layout which seems to be a reproduction she and O’Shea did in 2006.

    Howey concludes, “The Missaukee Earthworks site is probably a materialization of the tale of the origin and delivery of the Midewiwin great mystery by the servitor Bear.” I had to look up ‘servitor' to understand what she means, ie the Bear serves the Great Manitou.

    I would say, that's why the Ojibway chose it. Imagine coming upon these earthworks on an exploration party dressed for war. The shaman (intending gender neutrality) would gather in a small circle and smoke on it while gathering all the available thoughts and observations. By this time they would each have had their own pipes, but I imagine there would have been a special pipe for just such occasions, as the Calumet was only used for peaceful resolves.

     In this way they would have sussed out that this place was especially sacred. It was like it was prepared especially for them, though the reality is the myths of the original builders, the St. Clair Huron, were also based on sacred pairs. It’s a universal truth, after the One comes a pair. The Anishinaabe origin story of Bear fit perfectly over the terrain just as Howey and O’Shea show us. It just doesn’t follow that they built the earthworks.

    Logic says that had to be done by people who did that kind of thing, sedentary people not a newly arrived people who had been semi-nomadic for 500 years. Do we see a trail of their mounds and earthworks along the route of their migration? No.

    From a 1736 report of the Indian tribes connected with the French. “In their native condition the Chippewas were a timber people, living mainly by fishing and hunting. They were first found by the French at the Sault, and hence were called Saulteurs or people of the Sault. They were expert fishers and while they had no settled habitation to the same extent as the Iroquois, they cultivated maize and a few vegetables.”

    Would they suddenly acquire the skills to build these sacred enclosures and align them to the moon? Not likely, but it’s possible the knowledge in the form of those ancient Free Mason-like engineers could have come to them. Except the timing does't work. The mounds and earthworks Howey writes about were built long before Anishinaabe arrived in Michigan. And that’s a fact, Jack!

    That’s also not to say you shouldn’t read this book. It goes a long way to answering questions posed by the ‘custodian of Michigan archaeology’ W. B.. Hinsdale in his book Primitive Man in Michigan published n 1925. Meghan C. L. Howey’s Mound Builders and Monument Makes of the Northern Great Lakes 1200-1600 is the kind of book Hinsdale would consider reincarnating so he might study it to answer so many questions he took to his grave.

Below for Subscribers Only: The importance of Bear’s Journey today and a quick tale of Jumbi magic on St. Thomas.