Yesterday I described the region I read about. Today I will be covering the people in the region. The first people here were obviously the Native Americans. Even that’s a bit complicated. Within the historical time period, the people who inhabited the region were called the Woodland Sioux. That’s about all I know about them, but they were driven out by a group from the East known by several names. The most common name used was the Chippewa, also called the Ojibway. Among themselves, the name they apply is Anishinaabe. Wikipedia defines Anishinaabe as “Anishinaabe is the autonym for a group of culturally related indigenous peoples in what is now located in Canada and the United States. These also include the Odawa, Saulteaux, Ojibwe (including Mississaugas), Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, and Algonquin peoples.” The Anishinaabe were able to drive out the Woodland Sioux because they had access to gunpowder.
Generally, the settlers in this part of Minnesota are thought of as being Scandinavian. It is a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian peoples. That is if you exclude the Iron Ranges. In those regions, there was a mixture of peoples from every possible European country, it seems. There were Cornish miners from the west to Slavs from Eastern Europe. I am not sure about the ethnicity and could not find any information about the fishermen working Lake Superior. The settlements in this region seem to occur in the late 19th century. Today the mixture of peoples is quite different as there was the great outmigration following World War II. Now surprisingly, the region is being resettled a people wanting to retire here. I sometimes wonder why. Right now it is 0°F and in the past few days, we’ve had at least two feet of snow.
