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ONAMIA — On Saturday, June 13, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post hosted a 30th anniversary program that included walking and collection tours as well as an artist demonstration.
Visitors old and young huddled around in a circular bench. Those who couldn’t fit filled the remaining space of the Mille Lacs Indian Museum’s “four seasons room” and lined the guardrails of the exhibit. The four seasons room teemed as James Ozaawaanakwad Clark, Ojibwe relations liaison for the Minnesota DNR’s Office of Tribal Relations, walked them through the exhibit, where a life-sized diorama displayed the various ways in which the Ojibwe have used the region’s land for agriculture in the past and present.
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The exhibit ends with a display of winter traditions. Clark said it’s always the shortest part of the tour despite the fact that it’s the longest season, consisting of around six months. Precious Williams, who began working at the museum as a tour guide in October, said that part tends to elicit a reaction.
“I love the winter season when I get to explain the heated flooring, that’s my favorite part,” said Williams. “Like, when I tell them in the 1700s they had heated flooring.”
Williams said she understands visitors’ amazement, before she explained how it all worked.
“They would dig a hole about, say, maybe, like 1 foot deep, maybe, 3 to 2 in diameter, and then they’d have rocks about maybe like half a pound size, and kind of covering the whole hole, and then they build the fire right on top of it,” Williams said. “The rocks disperse the heat into the ground with the cat tails for insulation and the birch bark on the outside for keeping out moisture and whatnot. It gets their home to about 70 degrees.”
Travis Zimmerman, the site manager of the museum and trading post, said sometimes dioramas can be conflated as displays of the frozen past. Zimmerman said the museum is intentional in its mission to contextualize and display contemporary Ojibwe culture.
“A lot of these ways are still being practiced today,” Zimmerman said.
The exhibits include posts and infographics in both Ojibwe and English, the museum itself is built to mirror and follow the flow of the nearby Mille Lacs Lake, which visitors can track and trace from large windows in the circular pattern the museum was built around. Circularity, Zimmerman said, is an important element in Native culture.
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The first exhibition meant to display this history opened its doors in 1960. It was a collection donated to the Minnesota Historical Society composed of Native American goods accumulated over time by Harry and Jeannette Ayer, the settlers who founded the Trading Post and used it as a vehicle to sell Native American art from across the country.
The Trading Post today is a place for over 250 Native American artists to trade and sell their works including but not limited to beadwork, jewelry, various works of literature and clothing.
The museum as it stands today is the result of an ongoing collaboration between the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and the Minnesota Historical Society, which, in 1996, launched the museum as it was celebrated Saturday with an artist demonstration as well as collection and walking tours.
Mille Lacs Band member Benji Sam sat at a table littered with birchbark canoe making materials, and answered visitor questions about the process as he fused and stitched each individual canoe together from the sum of its parts using a neo-traditional model.
“Probably my first canoe was when I was like 3 or 4 years old, and then I started working on some things, and I got a little bit better over the course of time,” Sam said. “Then I went off to college and stopped doing all this, and then, like, three years ago I was poking my head around a gift shop somewhere, I think it was up the North Shore, and I grabbed onto a birch bark canoe, and it was super, super flimsy, and all I could think about was my grandmas being sad about how it was something that wasn’t put together with time and patience.”
Sam said this encouraged him to reinvigorate his interest in the process itself. The finished products laid on the far end, for visitors to feel the difference in fortitude between them and the raw sheets of bark.
“I think my favorite part of the process is when people put their hands on birch bark for the first time, and they’re incredibly surprised at how something that feels so flimsy by the time you’re done can be something incredibly structurally sound,” Sam said.
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This 30th anniversary event catalyzed program director Lily Lauer’s first ever guided tours, wherein she led visiting groups across the grounds and recalled the history that formed the trading post and how the land continues to inform the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe way of life. Lauer has worked at the museum for a little over a year.
“With my family’s history, like my grandmas went through boarding schools, so a lot of the traditions and culture were just totally wiped. So I did not grow up traditionally, like in any means,” Lauer said.
She said working at the museum has given her more comfortability with her Native culture and language, especially thanks to the ways the language is included and accounted for.
“My grandma rarely talked about anything, but working here I have language everywhere, and I’ve actually started to relearn the language, because I learned it in college, so not having anyone to speak with was hard,” Lauer said.
Clark works Saturdays at the museum as a tour guide and said a key part of the collaboration between the Mille Lacs Band and the Minnesota Historical Society is the inclusion of both languages and cultures.
“We have certain sites, we have certain ceremonies, we have certain things that we call them,” Clark said. “We are Anishinaabe. My great grandparents always said that without our language and culture, we’re not Anishinaabe, we’re just descendants, descendants of Anishinaabe.
Clark is the third generation in his family to have worked at the museum. In line with this multigenerational tradition, much of his family has come to see it as a home.
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“When we come in here and we see Clark, we see Boyd last names, that’s our relatives,” Clark said. “You see them on the panels, you see them on the veterans wall. It gives you a connection, gives you pride, it gives you love,” Clark said.
Clark has retained a large volume of oral history surrounding the area. He said even though his great-grandfather had been to boarding schools twice and had his language “beat out of him”, he maintained the knowledge and passed it down. He said his great-aunts recalled kids running into the woods and speaking Ojibwe to each other to keep the language alive.
“There’s a lot of trauma, there’s a lot of despair, right, but there’s a lot of resilience,” Clark said. “Our ancestors fought against removal, they were burning homes in the 20s, I believe. We still stayed, right. We’ve been fighting Mille Lacs County for the past 50 years, 60 years, we’re still here, no matter what the history is, we’re still here.”
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