Ojibwe

The Ojibwe, or Chippewa, are the largest Anishinaabe people, whose homeland Ojibwewaki stretches around the upper Great Lakes. Oral tradition tells of a westward migration guided by miigis spirits; at the Straits of Mackinac they separated from the Odawa and Potawatomi, with whom they kept the Council of Three Fires.

French missionaries mentioned them in 1640; armed through the fur trade, they checked the Haudenosaunee near Lake Superior in 1662 and drove the Dakota from the upper Mississippi. By the late eighteenth century they controlled most of Michigan, northern Wisconsin and Minnesota.

They allied with the French in the Seven Years' War and the British in the War of 1812. Known for birchbark canoes and scrolls and the Midewiwin medicine society, they resisted forced removal west of the Mississippi after the Indian Removal Act of 1830.