In Doodem and Council Fire, Heidi Bohaker examines the history of Anishinaabe law and governance from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This book is a vital contribution to long-standing debates over the nature and structure of Indigenous societies and polities in the Great Lakes because of her commitment to examine the principles of Anishinaabe governance on their own terms.Critical to Bohaker’s approach is her use of Anishinaabe political categories and vocabulary, eschewing “analogies from other political and cultural traditions” (xxvii). The two most important Anishinaabe concepts that Bohaker employs are the doodem (plural doodemag) and council fire. Doodemag are Anishinaabe kinship categories in which members of the same doodem are considered to be closely related, sharing descent from an other-than-human being. Council fires are “specific and long-standing deliberative bodies that were constituted and recognized through and by other Anishinaabe councils to have responsibility for the lands, waters, and people of a particular territory” (xvi–xvii). Each council fire was composed of members of multiple doodemag, while each doodem contained members of multiple council fires and was connected to other doodemag through intermarriage. Council fires and kinship, structured by the doodem system, together formed the “decentralized, interconnected, and interdependent alliance networks that formed the governments of the Anishinaabe peoples” (xvii).Bohaker’s analysis provides numerous insights. By centering alliance in her analysis of Anishinaabe governance, Bohaker moves beyond the imported concepts of nation, tribe, and village to vividly describe a world of diverse people bound together by kinship and the reciprocal obligations of care that went along with it. By focusing on kinship-based alliances, she shows how governance was based in the everyday practices and philosophical principles that governed Anishinaabe life. Her introduction of the concept of the council fire is especially revelatory. While scholars have recognized the importance of kinship in shaping belonging and diplomacy among Native peoples, Bohaker’s examination of council fires as the sites of Anishinaabe governance—defined by their connections and recognition by other councils, and the direct participation of the people they claimed responsibility for—provides a much clearer explanation of how Anishinaabe polities functioned. She also traces how Anishinaabe people incorporated outsiders into the doodem system and how their polities adapted to change over the period of the study. Bohaker thus provides an account of Anishinaabe governance and history that is firmly rooted in their own categories and in which the diversity and dynamism of Native people is key.These are great strengths, based in careful examinations of treaty pictographs and the Anishinaabe language. However, Bohaker’s focus on grounding Anishinaabe law and governance in an absolute conception of alliance is occasionally in tension with her description of a system that, she argues, was defined by decentralization, plurality, and continual negotiation. Central to her analysis is the assertion that, for the Anishinaabek, “to be in an alliance relationship carried with it the responsibility to care for the other. The idea of a conditional gift or a partial relationship was an astonishing concept indeed” (8), and “the Anishinaabek did not deploy a separate semantic category for ally, trading partner, or friend. You were either inawemaagen [relatives] or you were not” (26). Such absolutes sit oddly alongside the messy reality vividly described by Bohaker herself when, for example, she examines marriages as microalliances that created the Anishinaabe political world. Such intergroup bonds were potentially fraught things that could not simply be called into being but rather, “like all alliance relationships, had to be requested, arranged and maintained” (78–79), and she notes that the creation of kin relationships did not prevent the outbreak of violence between the Dakota and Anishinaabek. Such contradictions suggest that there is still work to be done reconciling the principles of Anishinaabe governance and the lived reality. Despite that, Bohaker has written a book that is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Indigenous peoples of North America or the Great Lakes.
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Feb 27, 2023
Matthias Mader + 1
Open Access
