Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-24T15:14:06.942Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Some Implications of Economic Change in Northern Ojibwa Social Structure*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

R. W. Dunning
R. W. Dunning*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access

Extract

Field-work was conducted for several summer periods and one complete year (1954–5) among the northern Ojibwa at Pekangekum. Pekangekum is situated in northwestern Ontario (52 degrees north latitude and 94 degrees west longitude), close to the Manitoba border and to the northern Ojibwa–Cree boundary. The major occupations of the people are fur trapping and subsistence hunting and fishing. The band is composed of treaty status Indians, numbering 382 persons in 1955, who communally own a small reservation of approximately 2,000 acres at the summer fishing centre.

In 1947 the provincial government registered all the territory as traplines, and the trappers therefore became licensed in the area in which they already trapped. The band's territory, which is low-lying and poorly drained forest and muskeg, comprises 4,800 square miles, that is, about 12.5 square miles per person. During the trapping season, approximately six months of the year, the population breaks up into eighteen residential groupings, averaging twenty-two persons each, and these units proceed to the centres of the trapping territories allotted to them by tradition. Usually such domestic groupings are ten or fifteen miles apart and are spread throughout the total territory of the band, but in summer they live nearly contiguously at two major summer fishing camps.

The population is made up of five extended families with patronymic totems. Formerly political authority was vested in the senior man of a domestic group on the basis of his dream-sanctioned success and power. Sometimes an individual magico-medical specialist held sway over wider territory, but his position rested on prestige rather than power, and each domestic group was usually autonomous.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , November 1958 , pp. 562 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1958

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Edmonton, June 7, 1958. The fieldwork was conducted with a fellowship from the Canadian Social Science Research Council. I am grateful to Professors Oswald Hall and T. F. McIlwraith for reading and commenting on the paper.

References

1 See my “Social and Economic Change among the Northern Ojibwa,” a manuscript in process of publication.

2 In the sense used by Eggan, Fred, “Social Anthropology: Methods and Results” in his edition of Social Anthropology of North American Tribes (2nd ed., Chicago, 1955), 530–1Google Scholar, referring to the changes in the kinship structure of the Cree and Ojibwa after their movement out onto the edge of the plains where they found that their old social organization was inadequate.

3 Hallowell, A. I., “Cross-Cousin Marriage in the Lake Winnipeg Area” in Davidson, D. S., ed., Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Studies (Philadelphia Anthropological Society), I (Philadelphia, 1937), 95–110.Google Scholar

4 See, e.g., Majumdar, D. N., A Tribe in Transition (London, 1937)Google Scholar, in which he analyses the changes in the Hos Tribe of the Chota Nagpur Plateau, India.