Presidential Address: Memory and Mobility: Grandma’s Mahnomen, White Earth

Abstract

Abstract In Jean M. O’Brien’s 2013 American Society for Ethnohistory Presidential Address, “Memory and Mobility: Grandma’s Mahnomen, White Earth,” she uses reminiscences of her grandmother, Edna Wright Tonneson, to explore the coming of her family to the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation in northwestern Minnesota in the late nineteenth century. Like many others from White Earth, her family’s story of reservation life involved ongoing patterns of mobility that predated and postdated their life on White Earth. While allotment policy drew them to the reservation, subsequent dispossession spurred further mobility but did not displace their identity as White Earth Ojibwes.