Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover Katrina M. Phillips (bio) Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover University of Minnesota Press, 2021 "To live on the shore of Lake Superior," Linda LeGarde Grover writes, "is to live with orientation to water, sky, and forest" (p. 47). Gichigami Hearts, Grover's latest collection of stories, poems, and histories, is a beautiful homage to what is now known as the city of Duluth, Minnesota. Incorporated in 1857—a mere three years after the second Treaty of La Pointe ceded most Ojibwe lands in what is now northern Minnesota and a year before Minnesota became a state—the city takes its name from the French explorer Daniel Greysolon, the Sieur du Lhut, who had arrived in the region in the 1670s to set up fur trade routes. Nicknamed the Zenith City in 1868 by Thomas Foster, who started the city's first newspaper, its location at the nose of Lake Superior helped it rise to prominence first in industry and now, among other things, through tourism. The region's rich Ojibwe history is often obscured, even as its echoes reverberate through the names that dot the city's landscape. The city itself—along with the state of Minnesota—would not exist without the treaty cessions that forced Ojibwe people from their homelands onto smaller reservations, like the ones set forth in the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe. Duluth's oldest social club, for instance, takes its name from Gichigami, the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior. Known as Misaabekong (the place of the giants) or Onigamiising (the place of the small portage) [End Page 116] in Ojibwe, the area around Duluth is rooted in Ojibwe history and oral traditions (p. ix). Thus, it is interesting, as Grover muses, that Ojibwe place names are often derived from the physical characteristics of the region, while American place names often draw from a person's name (p. 4). Like Grover, I am an Ojibwe woman who grew up in the region. The book and the stories within it feel like a homecoming. I know the street names and neighborhood names, I remembered the names of some of the stores and restaurants she references, and I understand the deep meaning Grover places on the stories she tells here. Gichigami Hearts is unapologetically hyperlocal, but its reach is far beyond what are now the city limits. It is part history, part autobiography, part geography, and part ethnography, sharing stories of places and people that now might only exist in the collective memories of those who were there or who have since shared these stories. The book is comprised of four sections: "Point of Rocks," "Gichigami Hearts," "Rabbits in Wintertime," and "Traveling Song." In the first section, Grover intertwines stories from her childhood, her family history, and neighborhood histories into the history of the city's department stores, family-owned businesses, and gospel missions. The second section, "Gichigami Hearts," moves through more stories of Grover's relatives up in Chippewa City, coupled with her tellings of Ojibwe stories of the mishibizhiig (the underwater spirit beings of the lake). The stories in the end of this section turn toward the role of Ojibwe people in the tourist trade in northern Minnesota, the people whose handcrafts were sold in tourist stands along the highways that hug the North Shore. Grover places these crafters and entrepreneurs in the long history of Native trade and engagement with Europeans (and, later, Americans), seeking not to denigrate those who sold art to tourists but to understand why and how Ojibwe people participated in these industries. What she calls "the entrepreneurship of Indian stands," she contends, was more than "a crass sale of goods, the desperation of a people in need" (p. 75). Grover's careful intertwining in and out of these nuances creates a richly powerful story of Ojibwe resilience. Grover weaves Ojibwe history, the histories of treaties and repressive federal policies that aimed to eradicate and erase Native peoples, like allotment and termination, throughout the book. She unflinchingly shows what may have drawn Ojibwe and non-Native men to the missions in Duluth that...