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The Ojibwa and Chippewa are not only the same tribe; they are the same word, pronounced a little differently. Some of the ways their name has appeared is Ojibweg, Ojibwey, Otchipwe, and Chippeway. The Woodland Ojibawa people use none of these spellings. The Ojibwa call themselves "original men". They lived in the northern Great Lakes Region. They were skilled hunters and trappers. They rarely used horses or hunted buffalo. They liked their forest home.
They traveled on foot or in sturdy birch bark dugout canoes. Everything these people used was made by hand, including their canoes.
The Chippewa were master canoe builders. First they put stakes in the ground, forming an outline of the canoe. The stakes were not part of the canoe. They were used to hold the boat upright while it was being built. Next, they placed thick sheets of birch bark inside the stakes, forming the canoe. They added bent cedar ribs to brace the canoe. They sewed the bark with string made from spruce roots. They glued it together with spruce gum that made the seams watertight. They had a portable, light weight, sturdy, waterproof bark canoe.
Some of their boats were so big they could move entire families. They moved around a lot because, except in the summer, the Ojibwa lived in isolated family camps, harvesting foods, as directed by their seasonal calendar.
Ojibwa life flowed in calendar months. Each family had a notch cutter. Each notch cutter kept the same stick for one month to mark the passing days. The cutter's job was to cut one notch in a stick each day to keep track of days. Months were tracked by watching the moon. When a month was over, they tossed the stick in the campfire and started a new moon stick.
Each month had a name, which was associated with something in nature. If you asked an Ojibwa what day it was, they might reply, "Today is the third day of the rice moon." Easy enough. August was the rice moon because that was the time the wild rice began to ripen.
