Heidi Bohaker

Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance. Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2020.

In Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance, Heidi Bohaker draws on a diverse and fragmented source base to produce a fascinating and original account of the principles and system of Anishinaabe governance dating to time immemorial and which also informed Anishinaabe responses to an evolving imperial/settler order. She uses what at first seem unassuming, if not marginal figures—doodem images—as a means to unfold the fundamentally different ontological premises that guide Anishinaabe peoples’ interactions with human and other-than-human beings, and explores the distinctive, yet also fluid political geometries that have characterized their social and legal relations over time. She demonstrates, convincingly, that there can be no reconciliation, let alone decolonization, in what is currently Canada without an accurate understanding of Anishinaabe peoples and other Indigenous Peoples and societies on their own terms. This book is a model for how settler scholars can and should conduct research into Indigenous histories—slowly and humbly, for settlers have much to unlearn that they have been taught, subconsciously as well as consciously, and that takes time and self-reflection; and always in conversation and collaboration with Indigenous people and communities. More broadly, this book is a model of how to write history that matters in the present and that can help fashion better futures for everyone in Canada. It reminds us that overlooking “small” things like doodem is perilous, for they contain multitudes—entire universes of meanings and relations—within them.