Anishinaabe clan system
The Anishinaabe, like most Algonquian-speaking groups in North America, base their system of kinship on clans or totems.
The clans, based mainly on animals, were instrumental in traditional occupations, intertribal relations, and marriages.
Anishinaabe Toodaims: is the social fabric context for politics, kinship, and identity of the Anishinawbeg peoples.
The men established "a framework of social organization to give them strength and order"[2] in which each totem represents a core branch of knowledge and responsibility essential to society.
Knowledge gained through experience and interactions with the natural world and other clan members is passed down and built upon through generations.
[3] Traditionally, each band had a highly democratic independent council consisting of leaders of the communities' Families / clans or odoodeman, with the group often identified by the principal doodem.
[6] Despite pressure from the colonial society in Canada and the United States, much Anishinaabe knowledge has survived and continues to be shared and built upon.
Alexander Wolfe's Earth Elder 18 Stories: The Pinayzitt Path, Dr. Dan Musqua's The Seven Fires: Teachings of the Bear Clan, and Edward Benton-Banai's The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway are a few notable works of Anishinaabe literature.
The clan types today are quite extensive, but usually only a handful of odoodeman are found in each of the Anishinaabe communities.
The metaphors that survive to today include: Some national sub-divisions were simply referred to by their major clan component.
More inland than the Maandawe-doodem were the Waagosh-doodem ('Fox clan') of the Meshkwahkihaki, who are called the Fox Tribe in English.
In other instances, for example odoodem communities such as the Amikwaa, they were treated as fully interdependent Nations of the Anishinaabeg Confederacy, or given a designation to represent their primary function in the social order, as with the Manoominikeshiinyag ('Ricing-rails') or the Waawaashkeshi-ininiwag ('Deer[-clan] Men').
Siblings generally share the same term with parallel-cousins as with any Bifurcate merging kinship system due to being a member the same doodem, but the modified system allows for a younger sibling to share the same kinship term with younger cross-cousins (nishiimenh).
The white crane clan were the traditional hereditary chiefs of the Ojibwe at Sault Ste.
Marie and Madeline Island, and were some of the more powerful chiefs encountered by the first French explorers of Lake Superior.
Since the first sustained contact by the Anishinaabe with the United States was through government officials, the symbol of the American eagle was taken for a clan marker.
