The True Legacy of Ogimaa Oboonidiyak (Chief Pontiac)
The Rise and Fall of Chief Pontiac
Once in a while a person of exceptional intellect and creativity, from the past or the present, inspires me into creating a painting, a graphic art work, a piece of jewelry, a poem… or a song. Today I like to share with you the remembrance of a great Anishinaabe Inini who lived two and a half century ago, and whose corrupted name – as it has been mangled through time in millions of strange mouths – is still widely known even today.
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About the author:
As a non-commercial artist and jewelry designer currently living in the Netherlands. I like to draw on the oral and pictorial traditions of my Ojibwe Anishinaabe ancestors from the American Great Lakes area. For this I call on my manidoo-minjimandamowin, or "Spirit Memory"; which means I try to remember the knowledge and the lessons of my ancestors.
The mazinaajimowinan or ‘‘pictorial spirit writings’’ - which are rich with symbolism and have been painted throughout history on rocks and etched on other sacred items such as copper and slate, birch bark and animal hide - were a form of spiritual as well as educational communication that gave structure and meaning to the cosmos.
Many of these sacred pictographs or petroforms – some of which are many, many generations old - hide in sacred locations where the manidoog (spirits) reside, particularly in those mystic places near the coastline where the sky, the earth, the water, the underground and the underwater meet.
It is these age-old expressions that provide an endless supply of story elements to my work – be it graphically, through my written stories, as well as in the context of my jewelry making.
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