Initially published in 1982 in the Smithsonian Folklife Series, Thomas Vennum's The Ojibwa Dance Drum is widely recognized as a significant ethnography of woodland Indians.-From the afterword by Rick St. Germaine

Collected from Chippewa Indians in northern Minnesota.

In 1894 Wisconsin game wardens Horace Martin and Josiah Hicks were dispatched to arrest Joe White, an Ojibwe ogimaa (chief), for hunting deer out of season and off-reservation. Martin and Hicks found White and made an effort to arrest him. When White showed reluctance to go with the wardens, they started beating him; he attempted to flee, and the wardens shot him in the back, fatally wounding him. Both Martin and Hicks were charged with manslaughter in local county court, and they were tried by an all-white jury. A gripping historical study, The Murder of Joe White contextualizes this event within decades of struggle of White’s community at Rice Lake to resist removal to the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, created in 1854 at the Treaty of La Pointe. While many studies portray American colonialism as defined by federal policy, The Murder of Joe White seeks a much broader understanding of colonialism, including the complex role of state and local governments as well as corporations. All of these facets of American colonialism shaped the events that led to the death of Joe White and the struggle of the Ojibwe to resist removal to the reservation.

Kinship, as an organizing principle, gives structure to communities and cultures—and it can vary as widely as the social relationships organized in its name. Making Relatives of Them examines kinship among the Great Lakes Native nations in the eventful years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, revealing how these Indigenous peoples’ understanding of kinship, in complex relationship with concepts of gender, defined their social, political, and diplomatic interactions with one another and with Europeans and their descendants. For these Native nations—Wyandot, Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Dakota, Menomini, and Ho-chunk—the constructs and practices of kinship, gender, and social belonging represented a daily lived reality. They also formed the metaphoric foundation for a regionally shared Native political discourse. In at least one English translation, Rebecca Kugel notes, Indigenous peoples referred to the kin-based language of politics as “the Custom of All the Nations.” Clearly defined yet endlessly elastic, the Custom of All the Nations generated a shared vocabulary of kinship that facilitated encounters among the many Indigenous political entities of the Great Lakes country, and framed their interactions with the French, the British, and later, the Americans. Both the European colonizers and Americans recognized the power-encoding symbolism of Native kinship discourse, Kugel tells us, but they completely misunderstood the significance that Native peoples accorded to gender—a misunderstanding that undermined their attempts to co-opt the Indigenous discourse of kinship and bend it to their own political objectives. A deeply researched, finely observed work by a respected historian, Making Relatives of Them offers a nuanced perspective on the social and political worlds of the Great Lakes Native peoples, and a new understanding of those worlds in relation to those of the European colonizers and their descendants.