7 
in this way, and that some of their great-grandfathers even hunted on th© 
north shore of lake Superior. No doubt there were various causes that 
induced the Ojibwa to move about, e.g., ill success in their own hunting 
territories and a desire to visit new places and new people; but the 
explanation given by some of the Parry Islanders is perhaps unique. 
Animals that frequently observed the image or shadow 1 of a hunter, they 
said, learned to be on their guard and could not be readily taken. A 
man then had more success if he moved to new territory where his shadow 
was unknown. Whatever the cause, however, this interchange of hunting 
territories slightly altered the composition of the various Ojibwa bands 
from year to year, though it did not impair their separate existence. 
Just as the land belonged to the entire band, so too did the fishing 
grounds, the groves of maple trees, and the fields of wild rice. These 
were never partitioned among the individual families, because they were 
not the products of man’s labour, but blessings bestowed by the Great 
Spirit on all the members of the band. The Ojibwa of Wisconsin and 
Minnesota, it is true, divided their rice fields into family plots, whose 
boundaries they marked by stakes, and each woman established her claim 
to a plot by tying together a few sheaves some days before the harvest. 2 
But in Georgian bay where both men and women harvested the crop, the 
Indians gathered indiscriminately and apparently avoided all friction. The 
same understanding applied to the maple groves. In the early spring, as soon 
as the sap began to run, a family would pitch its camp among the trees 
and begin to make sugar. It thereby pre-empted the grove for the season, 
and any other family that made its appearance, even though it had tapped 
these trees the season before, moved on to another grove. Even today the 
Parry Islanders and their neighbours immediately to the north acknowl- 
edge the common ownership of the maple groves, although the old explorer 
Thompson remarked, in 1799, that the Ojibwa of Red Cedar lake in 
Minnesota were dividing up their trees into family portions. 3 Evidently 
the Ojibwa on the eastern shore of lake Huron have been more tenacious 
of some of their old communistic practices than their kinsmen elsewhere, 
although the reason remains obscure. 
CLANS 4 
The Parry Island band, like those elsewhere among the Ojibwa, was 
subdivided into a number of clans (tudem, dodern ) 5 that are now rapidly 
disappearing. A man belonged to the same clan as his father, and could 
not marry a woman of his own clan even when she was a member of a 
distant band; that is to say, the clans were patrilinear and exogamous. 
This prohibition against marriage within the clan extended not only to all 
Ojibwa bands, but to the Ottawa and Potawatomi, who were organized 
in a similar way. Each clan bore the name of some natural object, 
1 The tidjibbom, which can travel ahead of the body. See pp, 18, 19. 
* Densmore, Frances: "Uses of Plants by the Chippewa Indians”; Forty-fourth Ann. Rept., Bur. of Am 
Ethn., 1926-1927. p. 313 (Washington, 1929). 
1 “David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in Western America”; edited by J. B. Tyrrell, p. 276; 
The Champlain Society, Toronto. 1916. 
4 The word clan is used throughout this monograph in the widest sense, without reference to the method of 
reckoning descent. The writer has preferred it to the more precise word “gens,” partly because it is more familiar 
to the general reader, and partly because it permits the use of the convenient derivative “clansmen.” 
* The alternative spellings represent dialectic variations. Pegahmagabow said tudem, three Potawatomi 
informants dodem. 
