Ojibwe

   Also known as Anishinaabeg, Ojibwa, and Chippewa. ANative American people now living in the Midwest of the United States and south-central Canada. Their Algonquian language makes a grammatical distinction between animate and inanimate genders; that is, it marks persons and personal actions differently to objects and impersonal events. While this indigenous people’s preferred self-definition, Anishinaabeg, identifies them as human persons, they speak of a wide range of other-than-human persons (e.g., rock-persons, treepersons, and thunder-persons). Honorific terms like grandparent are used to indicate respectful relationships not only with human relatives but also with honored rocks and other personal beings. Research among one band of Ojibwe by Irving Hallowell has been influential among more recent scholars of animism and shamans such as Nurit Bird-David. Within the broader animism of the traditional Ojibwe worldview and lifeways, there are specific ceremonial practices that may be considered shamanic, for example, the Midewiwin. John Grim’s book The Shaman focuses on different types of shamans among traditional Ojibwe: diviners, healers, dream interpreters, seekers and repositories of knowledge, and mediators with otherthanhuman persons, among others.