William Whipple Warren

[6] Bilingual and educated in the United States style, Warren started collecting stories from the oral tradition of the Ojibwe to tell their history.

After suffering from tuberculosis for many years, he died as a young man of 28 from a hemorrhage on June 1, 1853 and was buried in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

[5] William Whipple Warren was born in 1825 in La Pointe, Michigan Territory (present-day Wisconsin), on Madeline Island.

[7] As the Ojibwe had a patrilineal system, children were considered to be born into their father's clan and lines of descent.

Such multiracial children of the period often also faced discrimination by European-American society, whose people considered them more "Indian" than white, regardless of the lines of ancestry.

[5] (The senior Truman Warren had married a sister of Mary Cadotte, so the families were doubly linked.

He next attended the Oneida Institute near Whitesboro, New York, a Presbyterian college founded for the education of Native Americans.

In the fall of 1845, he moved to Crow Wing, Wisconsin Territory (now Minnesota) to work as an interpreter for the trader Henry Mower Rice.

The survey had been sent by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an early ethnologist and the former US Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the region.

Warren met Schoolcraft, who gave the young man an additional sense of how important his work was.

"[5] Encouraged by the reception of his work, Warren prepared A Brief History of the Ojibwas, which the Minnesota Democrat newspaper published in several installments in 1851.

He was one of seven members of the House who resigned in protest over the 1851 reapportionment plan, claiming that the census count was incorrect.

She had multi-racial ancestry similar to his: she was the daughter of Gin-gion-cumig-oke, an Ojibwe woman, and her husband William Alexander Aitken, a European-American fur trader.