On the other side of busy Highway 169 and a little ways down is the Mille Lacs Indian museum, jointly run by the Mille Lacs Band and the Minnesota Historical Society. In fact, the storyteller from the previous installment, Maude Kegg, worked there for many years. The highlight of the museum is a guided tour-only circular room about twenty-five feet in diameter. It is entirely enclosed and divided into four quarters (minus room for the entrance), representing the four seasons. Arranged continuously around the outside of the room is a beautifully kept up, life-size diorama showing typical scenes for each season.

The year starts biboong. Traditional Ojibwe bands dispersed during the winter because the scarcity of game required a large hunting range to sustain a family - a concentration of people in any one area would immediately exhaust the game available within a practical distance. Food collected the prior year and dried was also critical to making it through the winter, but it nevertheless it was a time of hardship - to be expanded on in a later installment.

During March and early April, when the winter's cold broke to days of higher sun and melting snow, families would move to their traditional sugaring grounds and spend a few transition weeks tapping the plentiful sugar maples and boiling the sap down for the rich syrup and sugar. Tapping buckets, originally made of birchbark, were cached nearby and retrieved at that time. The taps themselves were originally wooden, later metal.

Miinan.

As ziigwan turned to niibin, families would come together into small villages, many at traditional sites, setting up their wiigiwaman together and living off game, fish, vegetables, native plants, and berries - many different kinds as they came into season, but the June-July miinan were especially prized. This was a time of luxury.

Around August and into September, by our calendar, the wild rice (not related to rice, actually an aquatic grass) in the plentiful lakes began to ripen, and was easily harvested. Normally this would be done in pairs in a birchbark canoe; one person was responsible for paddling or poling the canoe along in the shallow waters favored by the manoomin and the person other responsible for "knocking" the rice. This consisted of using two moderately sized sticks, one to bend the stalks over the canoe, and a second to strip the ripe seeds from the tips and let them fall into the canoe, and was often performed by older family members, due to the lighter physical demands and considerable amount of skill and experience required for effective yields.

The raw wild rice seeds were washed and then parched over a large fire. After the advent of European trade goods, it was common to see the rice parched in large iron kettles, constantly stirred with a wooden stick or paddle to prevent burning. The parching caused the outer husk to dry out and separate from the meat, and the seeds were then crushed and winnowed in baskets to remove the inedible portions. Finally, the seed meats were dried and ground into flour, or used whole.

Manoomin.

To this day, wild rice is considered a Minnesota local specialty food, similar to the way maple syrup is characteristic of Vermont, and it's not difficult to buy it wild-harvested in local stores or markets. Nor is it difficult to harvest it yourself, but as described, it needs a fair amount of preparation before it's ready to eat.

The first snows often came in October, marking an end to the communal villages. Dagwaaging, families would dry and store meat, berries, and other foods to help them make it through the harsh season ahead. As winter gradually advanced on the land, groups split off and spread out over the snowy landscape.

This brief description of yearly activities points out how the Ojibwe (like many so-called "primitive" cultures - a very inaccurate word) can't really be classified in an easy way - and in fact adapted their lifestyle to a sometimes difficult but perfectly livable environment. They were neither fully nomadic, nor fully settled; neither fully hunter-gatherer, nor fully agricultural; and relied on a variety of resources to make their lives as comfortable as possible, passing on a wide array of knowledge from generation to generation.