February 1st, 2012

Post date: Feb 13, 2012 12:54:04 AM

On February 1^st the chapter was enlightened by Brad Bandow who gave his presentation entitled, White Dogs, Black Bears and Ghost Gamblers: Two Late Woodland Medewiwin Aspects from Ontario. Now to answer your question that probably leap into your mind upon reading the title of Brad’s presentation, a Medewiwin is basically a shaman. They were the historians, doctors, chemists, and spiritualist of their people.

Brad started his presentation by telling us a little about himself and how he has forty years of experience in the field of archaeology. (Somehow I think we would have believed him about what he found even without him telling us about his forty years of experience!) He told us how we were being honoured with this presentation as it was a sneak peak of the article that is going to be in the publication for the fortieth proceeding of the Algonquian Conference.

He told us how he had found lots of red and yellow ochre and more significantly he found clear quartz. Clear quartz are very rare finds raising red flags in his mind because they are also a sign of ritual artifacts. These quartz crystals were so good in quality that they were originally thought them to be bottle glass by some of the other archaeologists. These quartz were not local to the site he was working on, but they were imported by the natives to the site, further indicating their value.

The Ojibwa and Algonquian people did have a written language that was pictographic, (the most famous form of pictographic writing is Egyptian), but only a very few actually could read that language. Likely it was the spiritual leaders and chieftains were the only ones who could read these. Messages would have been written on birch bark and made into scrolls. Master narratives were created of ceremonies and/or religious beliefs that were created on copper plates, wooden planks or carved in stone and then copies would be made on birch bark scrolls. Then the master would be buried for safe keeping in a deep tree fall. These masters acted as a kind of library that were dug up every fifteen years to compare with what they had.

! Brad also spoke about Mede lodges (shaman lodges) and how only ghost lodges point north-south while all other lodges normally point west-east. The point of a ghost lodge was to help the souls of children who had died. They believed that everyone had two souls and the lodge was to help the one soul to be reincarnated and the other soul to go on its way. When the Europeans came they saw these lodges as extremely evil and often gave them evil names. So the next time you are a place called “Witches point” or the like, you are probably in a sacred spot to the local natives.

It was a very interesting presentation and I would like to thank Brad Bandow for taking the time to come and speak with us!