William Whipple Warren

For other people named William Warren, see William Warren (disambiguation).

William Whipple Warren (c. 1851)

William Whipple Warren (May 27, 1825 – June 1, 1853) was an Ojibwe historian, interpreter, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. Of Ojibwe and American descent, he was the first historian of the Ojibwe people.

He moved from Wisconsin to Crow Wing in the fall of 1845, where he worked as an interpreter for the fur trader Henry Mower Rice.

Bilingual and with an American education, Warren started collecting stories from the oral tradition of the Ojibwe from an early age to tell their history. He suffered from lung problems for many years and died as a young man of 28 from tuberculosis on June 1, 1853. His work was published posthumously in 1885 by the Minnesota Historical Society, and in a revised edition in 2009.

Early life and family

William W. Warren was born at La Pointe, Michigan Territory (present-day Wisconsin), on Madeline Island. He was the son of Lyman Marcus Warren, an American fur trader and a descendant of Richard Warren, and Mary Cadotte. She was the daughter of the major fur trader Michel Cadotte, of Ojibwe-French descent, and his Anishinaabe wife Ikwesewe, of the White Crane clan. As the Ojibwe had a patrilineal system, children were considered to belong to their father's clan. Those born to a non-Ojibwe father had no clan or place within the tribe. William had a brother Truman and sisters Julia and Mary. (His father's brother Truman married a Cadotte sister, so the families were doubly linked; they had twin sons Edward and George Warren, a few years younger than William.)

After attending Protestant mission schools at La Pointe and on Mackinac Island, in 1836, young Warren traveled with his paternal grandfather Lyman Warren to Clarkson, New York. There he lived with his grandfather and attended Clarkson Academy. He next attended the Oneida Institute near Whitesboro, New York, a Presbyterian college that combined liberal and what was called industrial or crafts education. The director was Beriah Green, an abolitionist. In 1840 Warren returned to his family in La Pointe.

Career

Warren liked to sit with his mother's people and hear the Ojibwe stories. At age 17, he started working as an interpreter. At the same time, he made notes on the stories and history of the people when he could. In the fall of 1845 he moved to Crow Wing, Minnesota to work as an interpreter for the trader Henry Mower Rice. Warren continued collecting stories and began to write a history of the Ojibwe.

In 1848 Rice had Warren answering questionnaires on the Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe, which had been sent by early ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was collecting material for what would be his six-volume history of Native Americans. Warren met Schoolcraft, who had previously served as the US Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the region.This opportunity gave Warren an additional sense of how important his work was. Rice passed Warren's work on to the Minnesota Pioneer, which published his essays on history in 1849.

In time away from his work as an interpreter with Rice, Warren continued to collect the stories he heard, as well as to figure ways to identify dates in the Ojibwe oral histories. Historians have found that his work is generally quite accurate. As the historian Theresa Schenk notes in a 2009 edition, he was "one of the first to recognize the value of oral tradition as a source for history."

Encouraged by the reception of his work, Warren prepared A Brief History of the Ojibwas, which the Minnesota Democrat published in several installments in 1851. He used the perspective of his American education to present the stories of his Ojibwe people that told of their wars, political leaders and history, always crediting his sources. Most of his informants were men, as would be traditional for a young man. He felt the culture was disappearing and needed to be conveyed from its own people. As a man who participated in two cultures, he was considered a mixed-blood.

In 1851 Warren was elected as a legislator from the Minnesota Territory, serving in the Minnesota Terrtorial House of Representatives. Rice became a politician also, serving as an United States Senator (1858–1863) and running as a candidate for governor in 1865.

Marriage and family

William married Mathilda Aitken, August 10, 1843 at La Pointe, Wisconsin. She was born around 1822 at Sandy Lake, Minnesota and baptised September 13, 1835 at La Pointe. Her ancestry was similar to his: she was the daughter of William Alexander Aitken, a fur trader, and Gin-gion-cumig-oke, an Ojibwe.

The Warren children were :

• Alfred A. (1844–1934)
• Cordelia H. "Delia" (c. 1846–1940)
• Anna (1846–1940)
• William Tyler (1848–1900)
• Madeline (1853–1907)

After the early death of Warren in 1853, the widow Mathilda married Louis Fontaine. Under the Dawes Act, she was allotted land on the White Earth Reservation as "Mathilda Fontaine." She died October 19, 1902.

Work

• Warren's History of the Ojibway People, Based Upon Traditions and Oral Statements (1885) was published more than 30 years after his death by the Minnesota Historical Society. He was the first European-style historian of the Ojibwe people and his work is considered influential in teh field. It was reprinted in 2009 in a version annotated and edited by the historian Theresa Schenk, who provides context for his work.