BOOK: An Ojibwe Home in the City

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“What does it mean to be part of an urban Native community?” Sasha Maria Suarez wonders. It’s a question her book, An Ojibwe Home in the City: White Earth Women and Community Organizing, clarifies and redirects. “What if the home was always the place that Native women were organizing?” Suarez asks.

Suarez is a direct descendent of the White Earth Nation and an assistant professor of history and American Indian and Indigenous studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research and writing have roots inspired by education. Re-examining and rejecting narratives, Suarez was guided by her education in the Minneapolis Public School System to a deep exploration of Ojibwe history and tradition in the Twin Cities.

An Ojibwe Home in the City centers the stories of Native women often lost not only to Minnesota history but to Native history as well. “I wanted to root my project in words of the community itself,” Suarez says.

The historical archive often has obscured the voices of the White Earth Ojibwe people in Minneapolis, especially women, who “were vocal about what they wanted: self-determination.”

The American Indian Center in Minneapolis was established thanks to the efforts of White Earth women. Suarez began a quest to uncover their contributions and their history, which led her to a guiding touchstone in her book: the home as a place where Ojibwe culture persists and thrives.

Centering the Home

“Settler-knowledge” — which refers to the system of truth created and perpetuated by colonizing societies — has perpetuated the devaluation of home life, ignoring its role as the “root of public wellness” for Ojibwe people. “Home is the center of all organizing,” Suarez says. “Without the home, I don’t know what urban Ojibwe history would look like.”

The home she refers to is not only a private familial place but a public one — an autonomous space for Anishinaabe culture in the Twin Cities. “Ojibwe women are the ones that hold it all together,” she says.

Sewing clubs are one vital chapter in White Earth community organizing. For example, the Sah-Kah-Tay Sewing Club in Minneapolis was founded during the Great Depression era as a space for Ojibwe women to gather and connect with tradition.

The Meriam Report of 1928 was a government study that struggled to understand how — despite migration away from reservations — the Ojibwe community in Minneapolis in particular continued to have a strong identity. Suarez says the report noted: “They seem assimilated by all accounts. They have fairly nice houses. They have modern appliances. They have, in some cases, cars. They go to the movies.”

Federal researchers did not understand, however, how such mundane details of urban living did not also equate to a rejection of Ojibwe culture. In fact, Suarez says, “The Minneapolis Native community was doing political and social organizing out of family homes.”

The founding of the Division of Indian Work and the Minneapolis American Indian Center in Minneapolis is thanks to the efforts of White Earth women. Suarez credits White Earth leaders such as Emily Peake, Ignatia Broker, and Winnie Jourdain as three of the women who pursued the center as “an embodiment of [survival] in urban space.”

Suarez hopes her book will impart lasting lessons about reframing history. “I hope that people talk about the women I write about. I hope they become a regular part of the conversation about the history, not just of Minneapolis, but of Ojibwe history — of wider history, of native history,” she says. “The work they did was transformative and important.”

She also hopes the book reaches people “who just need the reminder that they are Ojibwe ‘enough,’ no matter where they are. … We come from a people who have always understood how to take our community and our home with us,” Suarez says. “For me, that is the biggest lesson I’ve learned from these women. You can always find your way home if you know that.”

An Ojibwe Home in the City: White Earth Women and Community Organizing in Minneapolis will celebrate its publication on October 13 at Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, where Suarez spent four years as an employee.

Book Excerpts

Among the Twin Cities Chippewa Council’s founding members were Fred and Louise Peake, who had moved from White Earth Reservation around 1914 with their first child, Natalie. By all accounts, the Peakes have typically been identified as part of the middle-class group of Minneapolis Indians described in the Meriam Report. … Their long-term participation in the founding and continuation of [the Council] directly refutes any assumption that they were happily assimilating into Minneapolis’ white community.

…

Alongside political organizing, the Peake household also became a site of social networking and support. Their home was a space in which community knew you could gain access to indigenous knowledge about Minneapolis outside of the city’s social welfare infrastructure. In essence, the Peake home became a gateway into the city and urban life for many Indigenous peoples over the course of the twentieth century. The Peake household’s place within Minneapolis’s urban Indian community was strengthened in large part by Louise Peake, who initiated her role as an earnest host to Native peoples visiting from White Earth, those passing through the city, and those newly arrived.

…

The importance of the family home as a space out of which Ojibwe women organized support for the community is best reflected in the continuity of sewing groups, which facilitated social, emotional, and physical connections between Ojibwe women and other Indigenous peoples. For Louise Peake, the social structure of a sewing club came to fruition in the presence of the Sah-Kah-Tay Club, which was likely founded in the early 1930s. The club was in many ways doing double duty for Indigenous women. Its founding was tied to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (‘the Indian Division’) and thus allowed Indigenous women access to a predominantly white world of women’s organizing and philanthropy. Yet given its Indigenous members, Sah-Kah-Tay also promoted a general bridge between the formalization and informalization of social, political, and philanthropical organizing around the betterment of American Indian lives in Minneapolis.

The creation and long-term maintenance of Minneapolis sewing groups were actively decided by Ojibwe women to adapt not only social networks but also their roles within Anishinaabewaki as community organizers. By nurturing these sewing groups, Ojibwe women were refuting the notion that their urban residence marked them as assimilated and somehow less Ojibwe. Ojibwe women were able to invest time and resources into supporting other Indigenous people in intricate social networks that upheld intertribal community and created space for continued development for that community. The family home was essential to these efforts as it allowed Ojibwe women to carry out their social responsibilities to their relatives and community by adapting notions of acceptable domesticity and women’s engagement in the growing world of social welfare.

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At weekly meetings, members would take up a host of activities. At the forefront, of course, was the work of sewing clothing, which was often donated or used to raise funds during events co-sponsored with other Indian organization. … While providing material support to Indigenous peoples remained an essential element of the clubs agenda, the group began moving toward the transmission of ancestral knowledges and history as well.

By the end of the 1930s, Sah-Kah-Tay was promoting its role in carrying out and passing along cultural practices of making ‘crafts.’ Among the club’s Ojibwe and Dakota members, they worked to ‘preserve the rug patterns of their ancestors, make baskets out of sweethearts that grows wild, use their looms for network and make buckskin moccasins and dolls when they could find enough deer to furnish the buckskin.’* At meetings women visited while stitching the geometric and floral designs that represent Dakota and Ojibwe art styles.”

* Quoted from the Minneapolis Star, October 24, 1940: “Indian Women Are Active in Federation.”

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