Tikanaagan, Childcare And Women’s Labour

An article by Chandra Murdoch

In the same way as it is today, childcare was central to women’s ability to work historically.

This ability to work while having children was key to fulfilling their roles in supporting family and community well-being, as well as exercising their legal and governance responsibilities over territory through participation in wild rice cultivation and sugar bush work (to name a couple of examples). The tikanaagan, aside from keeping young children safe, facilitated mothers’ mobility for labour and their ability work alone and in community. Maintaining strong relationships of care with other adults such as grandparents, extended family and a supportive broader community was likewise instrumental in allowing women who had children to continue in their working lives and continue with their essential responsibilities in maintain community health and well-being.

Anishinaabe historian Brenda Child tells the story of Quikabanokwe (Dawn Woman), who was 98 when her grandsons interviewed her in the 1930s. She and her first husband, Marksman (Manegoneosh) lived in the Upper Michigan peninsula with their three sons before her husbands’ early death. After this, his relatives “adhered to a practice valid in Ojibwe society where they came from Michigan to collect the children.” Her grandsons described this:

‘After his death his relatives from l’Anse offered to adopt one or all of the children. They reasoned that because of the loss of their father, whose earnings were the sole support of his family, his children would suffer for want of the necessities of life; but their mother, Qui-ka-ba-no-kwe, refused to part with the children, and her unceasing vigilance for their welfare as well as her efforts for their support after the loss of their father is deserving of mention.’

The youngest of her sons was still in a tikanaagan, and she worked to keep her family together, supporting their diet with “edible roots, nuts, berries, maple sugar, and wild rice.” Her grandsons drew attention to their grandmothers skill for combining berry picking and child care:

While picking the wild cranberries which thrive in the field-like marshes, the canoe was dragged away from the water or channel and taken into the marsh where the water was not more than three or four inches deep. After cautioning the children to remain in the canoe, the mother picked the berries within sight and sound of the children. The older children played and slept in the craft the whole day, occasionally partaking of the food and drink left for them by their mother who also left her berry picking to “see how they were” from time to time. The surplus of these wild crops such as rice, berries, and maple sugar was sold or bartered to the logging camps and to the traders in Odanah and Bay City…

Importantly, while in this case she worked alone, her grandsons also note that members of the community “did not abandon this hardworking widow, who from time to time received donations of meat and fish” until she remarried. This community support also enabled her to keep her family together.

Community care of children was likewise built into structures of how women organized their collective work in the wild rice camps and the sugar bush. Children were integrated here, and this integration was fundamental to their education. Anthropologist Frances Densmore interviewed Nodinens, a woman of 74, in 1907 in Mille Lacs, Minnesota. Nodinens noted that that “elderly women organized labor and held things together in the sugar bush: ‘Grandmother had charge of all this, and made the young girls do the work.’” Children would learn to make and use makak [birchbark containers] to store food, as well enjoy maple snow cones and sugar candy. Child describes the wild rice harvest as “the most visible expression of women’s autonomy in Ojibwe society” where legal rights to use rice beds were exercised and essential food sources were secured. It was “a model of intergenerational cooperation and learning, as collectives of women of all ages harvested and processed rice, supported by their children,” and where “Collectives of women controlled the entire social organization of the harvest, deciding on the rules and locations of campsites.” Children likewise had a role to play here, and historical photographs described by Child show “many different family members worked the bootaagan [carved wooden mortar for removing chaff], from children to elderly men.”

Anishinaabe writer Leanne Simpson also notes that a reprieve from community responsibilities was expected for parents. She writes: “The primary responsibility of parents is that of provider; so during [the “planting”] life phase, contributions to the wider community and nation were kept to a minimum.” This was due to the importance placed on strong parent-child relationships in maintaining strong communities and nations. She describes looking at Gashkibidaaganag [Bandolier Bags] in museum collections with Mark Thompson-ba, an Anishinaabe medicine person from Winnipeg:

He explained to me the meaning that the beadwork on each bag is a form of language that communicated the particular medical and healing skills of the owner. Each bag however, had a section that was completely blank, absent of beadwork. When I asked Mark what that meant, he explained that this was the period of time when the owner of the bag stopped learning about medicinal plants because they were busy raising children. Nishnaabeg people say their parental responsibilities as paramount. They recognized that children require a lot of time, and that healthy relationships take time to foster, develop and maintain. Nishnaabeg parents have been taking parental leave for thousands and thousands of years.

Children’s care was integrated into the important labour of women, and was supported by learning from older relatives and other community members. The integration of childcare and labour would have been repeated in agricultural pursuits, preparing food for storage, and harvesting berries– and in all of the other essential work that women did. Madeleine Whetung, in discussing the decline of manoomin with the building of the Trent-Severn waterway notes: “The dispossession of territory toward which women hold particular responsibility has over time contributed to the subjugation of women’s roles in Nishnaabeg society and to the creation of a structure that allows for increased violence against Anishinaabe women. When we lose the sites of much of our places of governance and the locations of our labour, our integral value to the running of the nation is more difficult to see.” Historically, the care of infants and children was built into labour organization that allowed women to assert their value in running the nation and to fulfil their responsibilities for family and community care. Facilitated by strong childcare mechanisms such as the tikanaagan, “parental leave” and childrens integration and education in community work, this ensured that enough food would be provided for the community through women’s labour, as well as that children would learn the essential skills to carry these responsibilities to future generations.