The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario

The Ojibwa have lived in Ontario longer than any other ethnic group. Until now, however, their history has never been fully recorded. Peter Schmalz offers a sweeping account of the Ojibwa in which he corrects many long-standing historical errors and fills in numerous gaps in their story. His narrative is based as much on Ojibwa oral tradition as on the usual historical sources.

Beginning with life as it was before the arrival of Europeans in North America, Schmalz describes the peaceful commercial trade of the Ojibwa hunters and fishers with the Iroquois. Later, when the Five Nations Iroquois attacked various groups in southern Ontario in the mid-seventeenth century, the Ojibwa were the only Indians to defeat them, thereby disproving the myth of Iroquois invincibility.