Preface

Among the most dynamic Aboriginal peoples in western Canada today are the Ojibwa, who are known also as plains Ojibway, Saulteaux, and Bungi.The Ojibwa of the prairie provinces have played an especially vital role in the development of an Aboriginal political voice at both the provincial and federal levels of Canadian government.The former Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, and leaders such as Ovide Mercredi and Philip Fontaine, have been central to the struggles of Aboriginal people for self-determination, control of education for Native children, and the inclusion of Native rights in Canada's constitution.The pre-eminence of the Ojibwa in modern western Canada belies the fact that they are relative newcomers to the region and have occupied the parkland and prairies only since the last decades of the eighteenth century.This work traces the origins of the western Ojibwa, their adaptations to the West, and the ways in which they have coped with the many challenges they faced in the first century of their history in that region, between 1780 and 1870.The western Ojibwa are the descendants of Ojibwa people who migrated into the West from their homes around the Great Lakes in the late eighteenth century.For them, as for all the peoples of the subarctic forests of the Canadian Shield and of the plains and parkland, this was an era of change.Between 1770 and 1870, the western Ojibwa and other peoples of the northwestern interior faced and survived waves of epidemic disease, the rise and decline of the fur trade, the depletion of game populations, the founding of non-Native settlement, the loss of tribal lands, and the Canadian government's assertion of political control over them.As a people who emerged, adapted, and survived in a climate of change, the western Ojibwa demonstrate both the effects of historic forces that acted upon Native peoples and the spirit, determination and adaptive strategies that Native people have used to cope with those forces.This study examines the emergence of the western Ojibwa within this context, seeing both the cultural changes that they chose to make and the continuity within their culture as responses to historical pressures.The origins, motivations, and development of the western Ojibwa can best be understood as the products of a creative, dynamic tension between continuity and change, between

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.