In Doodem and Council Fire, Heidi Bohaker examines the history of Anishinaabe law and governance from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This book is a vital contribution to long-standing debates over the nature and structure of Indigenous societies and polities in the Great Lakes because of her commitment to examine the principles of Anishinaabe governance on their own terms.
Critical to Bohaker’s approach is her use of Anishinaabe political categories and vocabulary, eschewing “analogies from other political and cultural traditions” (xxvii). The two most important Anishinaabe concepts that Bohaker employs are the doodem (plural doodemag) and council fire. Doodemag are Anishinaabe kinship categories in which members of the same doodem are considered to be closely related, sharing descent from an other-than-human being. Council fires are “specific and long-standing deliberative bodies that were constituted and recognized through and by other Anishinaabe councils to have responsibility for the lands, waters,...
