10/03/2006

Generation Why

What's in a name?

In Indian culture, everything

BY ROSE N. PETOSKEY
Special to the Record-Eagle

Record-Eagle/Jan-Michael Stump
Rose N. Petoskey stands on the shore near Omena in a prayer dress she wears when dancing at powwows. She said she dances in the dress to help people with their prayers to the creator. The jingles on the dress are made from tobacco can lids, one for each day of the year, to represent tobacco, which is a sacred part of the ceremony.

My name is Noozeen (Rose) Nimkiins (Little Thunder) Petoskey (Rising Sun) and I am Anishinaabek.

Many people would associate the word Petoskey with the souvenir stone found on the northern Lake Michigan shorelines. However, to my family, the word Petoskey represents much more than a souvenir.

In the Odawa language, the word Petoskey (Bii-daa-si-ga) means the rising sun, the day's first light, or the sun's first rays moving across the water. The Petoskey stone is a fossilized coral created by impressions made in limestone during the last Michigan ice age. These stones were named "Petoskey" because the impressions resembled the rising sun coming up over the water. Just as the image of the rising sun is implanted within the Petoskey stone, the archaeology of a person's names is implanted within. All names within our Anishinaabek culture reflect an individual's personal history. Rocks go deep, but names go much deeper to reveal the stories of the past.

As Anishinaabek, we have continued the cultural tradition of expressing and defining who we are through our names. A name represents many things. It represents a person's identity, connection to culture, connection to the past, and most importantly, it helps to guide one's journey through life. For years, our Indian elders, including my grandparents, called my brother and I Noozeen and Zhaabdiis. As children, we thought these were nicknames or affectionate names. We later learned that our elders were simply saying Rose and John in Odawa.

My middle name, Nimkiins, speaks to my origins within my family. My parents were married in a traditional Anishinaabek ceremony. During the ceremony, there was a huge thunderstorm. This was significant to my mother and father because my mother is of the thunder clan. My mother saw the storm as a sign that the thunderers (spirits of the thunder) were blessing their marriage. As a gesture of gratitude and to honor the thunderers, my mother gave me the middle name Nimkiins, meaning "Little Thunder."

I have a photograph of my great-grandparents in the early 1900s standing in front of their "European" rough cut board house located on South Fox Island. They look at me with unhappy grimaces across 100 years of change. They stand stiff and forlorn in their awkward-looking tattered cotton European clothes. Their children — my grandparents — spoke Odawa as their first language. My grandparents had many fond memories of speaking Odawa fluently as children. I have many fond memories of them sitting around our kitchen table reconstructing their original Odawa language after a lifetime of speaking English. I can only surmise that the photograph of my great-grandparents represents an era of transition from English as a distinct foreign language to English as the first language, the Odawa language receding like the tattered edges of the photograph.

The photograph clearly reflects the many compromises made by my ancestors to survive as Anishinaabek in "American" society. I am now a product of that difficult journey across the cultural divide of time.

As a contemporary Anishinaabe kwe (Odawa woman), I believe that our past is alive in the present in more ways than we often recognize. One way the past is present today is that as an Anishinaabe kwe, I still encounter people with a lack of understanding of our history and culture. I have experienced many encounters with non-Indians who are unfamiliar with the fact that we still exist. I leave these encounters feeling as though I am seen as a living artifact of the past. They ask inane questions such as, "Where are your moccasins?" or "Do you live in a tee-pee?" This tendency to freeze frame and categorize all living Indians as relics of the past does not recognize the mutual history of non-Indians and Anishinaabek.

Clearly, Indians have become Americanized, but Americans have also adopted some of the values and beliefs of Indian people. Some Euro-Americans have adopted the Indian belief in a living natural world, where animals, trees, water and rocks are living beings, just as people are living beings. This unrecognized process of Europeans being assimilated into Indian cultural beliefs has lately manifested itself in the spread of alternative lifestyles that are environmentally friendly. In a sense, Euro-Americans have become Euro-Indian-Americans, with the current environmental movement and organizations such as Greenpeace being examples of the phenomenon and the present-day pervasive belief and understanding that the environment is central to our well-being.

This essay opens up only a small window into the lives and meaning of names to the Anishinaabek. As Anishinaabek, we have kept our family names in the process of becoming "American." In that way, we have preserved the past, much like the Petoskey stone has preserved an image of the past.

Although the Anishinaabek have gone through many years of assimilation, we have never assimilated our Noozwaagan (Namesake). Names will forever define my culture.

I hope that in the future, there will be fewer misconceptions about Indian culture. I hope that people will come to realize our culture is still alive and represents the struggles and victories of our ancestors. Too often, Euro-Americans have told our stories from their perspective, embellishing our history with tales of Indian princesses and courageous French fur traders. This perspective is not the real story of the Anishinaabek.

The real story is a tale of courageous and spiritual people who have a deep connection to the land and place we call Bii-daa-si-ga.

Rose N. Petoskey is in the 11th grade at Northport High School and is a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.