Kagiwigwan

Kagiwigwan is an Ojibwe name recorded for the Crow Wing River in Minnesota, a tributary of the upper Mississippi. Historical spellings and translations vary; Warren Upham associated the name with a raven's feather rather than the crow suggested by the usual English name. The river corridor contained Indigenous burial places and linked communities along its banks well before the growth of American towns.

Dakota people held the region before the westward movement of Ojibwe communities in the early eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century Ojibwe territory extended west of the Mississippi and north of the Crow Wing. Fur traders entered this changing borderland during the 1700s. In 1792 the North West Company established a post at Wadena, where the Partridge River meets the Crow Wing. Farther downstream, Allan Morrison established an American Fur Company post near the Mississippi confluence in 1823. These posts connected the river's Indigenous inhabitants with commercial networks without erasing the older geography of homelands, travel and exchange.